“Johnny had this riff, where he and Morrissey had worked on it I don’t know, but Morrissey’s looking through the window and we’re playing away there and Mozz is going (look of extreme satisfaction). Yep, again, again, yep, this is it, this is the one. But that song’s all over the place, all over the place.”1
- Mike Joyce

A Song Born of Necessity

The eighth track on The Queen Is Dead, “Vicar in a Tutu” is conspicuously placed between the emotional Sturm und Drang of “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” two of the album’s weightier songs. The track is a rollicking two minutes and twenty-one seconds of humor and wit, infused with rockabilly and skiffle elements. Its sound, subject matter, and placement were no accident; the song serves to soften the album’s sequence, much as “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” follows in the wake of the incendiary fury of the title track.

A last-minute addition to the album, the song was composed and recorded near the end of the sessions for The Queen Is Dead in November 1985 at Jacobs Studios in Surrey, England. As with the rest of the material for the album, Morrissey and Johnny Marr produced the song themselves, with Stephen Street serving as recording engineer. The Smiths recorded the song at the eleventh hour, following a decision to omit “Unloveable” from the album, a track that would eventually surface as a B-side the following year.2

The decision was understandable, as “Unloveable” treads familiar lyrical ground. Moreover, its declarations of alienation, self-pity, and romantic inadequacy verge on the formulaic. Had it appeared on The Queen Is Dead, it would have added yet another layer of melancholy to an album already laden with emotional anguish, but without the lyrical sophistication or poignancy of its stronger compositions.

The frenetic pace and style (not to mention length) of an early instrumental demo of ”Vicar In A Tutu” suggests that the Smiths may have envisioned an extended, full-tilt rockabilly jam. While certain elements are found in the definitive version, they pale in comparison to its initial conception. Listen to the demo at the following link:

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Genesis and Recording

“Bigmouth Strikes Again” began to take shape as an instrumental rehearsed during soundchecks on the Smiths’ Meat Is Murder tour in the spring of 1985. By that summer, Morrissey had written the lyrics, which he constructed around the song’s title. By September, the Smiths recorded the song at RAK Studios in the leafy London neighborhood of St John’s Wood, with Morrissey and Johnny Marr producing and Stephen Street serving as recording engineer.

Listen to a demo of the song recorded at RAK Studios at the following link:

British singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl was invited into the studio to provide backing vocals for the track. According to Marr, “That’s the first time we met her. She came down to the studio and put on these really weird harmonies.”1 Apparently unconvinced that MacColl’s contributions enhanced the recording, her vocals ended up being removed from the final mix. In their place, Morrissey used his own vocals that were digitally enhanced through a harmonizer, with the tape subsequently sped up to the point where they sounded more like the utterances of an injured chipmunk. Morrissey’s backing vocals were credited on the album to ‘Ann Coates’, a play on the name of the Ancoats district of Manchester.2

Listen to the definitive version of the song below:

Single Release, Sleeve and Deadwax Messages

The first single (or second, if one counts the September 1985 release of “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” as a bona fide single from an album that had yet to be recorded) from the forthcoming studio album, “Bigmouth Strikes Again” was released on 22 May 1986 and reached number 26 on the UK Singles Chart. Backed by “Money Changes Everything,” with the addition of “Unlovable” on its 12-inch edition, the single is one of only two to feature nothing but the word ‘Smiths’ on the front cover, the other being the band’s subsequent single, “Panic” (assuming one does not count that summer’s German issue of the “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” single).

The sleeve features a photograph of a fresh-faced, bespectacled James Dean, barely 17 years old, astride a motorcycle (a 1947 Czech Whizzer, purchased for him by his uncle, Marcus Winslow3) in his hometown of Fairmount, Indiana, in 1948. The photograph was taken by Dean’s classmate and childhood friend, Nelva Jean Reynolds.4

Both the UK 7-inch and 12-inch editions of the single bore inscriptions etched into their respective runout grooves: “BEWARE THE WRATH TO COME” on the A-side and “TALENT BORROWS, GENIUS STEALS” on the B-side. The former was taken from a banner briefly visible in the 1954 film Hobson’s Choice,5 a favorite of Morrissey’s.6 Accompanying the title track, the inscription assumes an ominous quality, echoing the warning glimpsed in the film.

The B-side inscription, “TALENT BORROWS, GENIUS STEALS,” is a maxim commonly attributed to Morrissey’s favorite author, Oscar Wilde, although there is no record that Wilde ever wrote or uttered it. The saying has likewise been attributed to Pablo Picasso, again without any evidence to substantiate this. Its origins may instead be traced to the American-born poet, essayist and playwright T. S. Eliot, whose 1920 essay Philip Massinger contains a more elaborate expression of the same sentiment:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.7

Album Placement and Subsequent Releases

The song is the sixth track on The Queen Is Dead, the band’s third studio album, released in June 1986.

Sandwiched between “Cemetry Gates” and “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side,” “Bigmouth Strikes Again” occupies the central position in a sequence of three seemingly disconnected tracks, transforming them into a triptych that traces the predicament of an artist whose words must first be his own, only to be challenged when they are uttered, and whose sincerity is subsequently met with disbelief.

According to Morrissey, Johnny Marr proposed changing the album’s title to Bigmouth Strikes Again:

...the album title worries Johnny. His parents are upset to think that anyone would call an album The Queen Is Dead, and Johnny asks me if I would consider switching the title to Bigmouth Strikes Again. I stand my ground and, knowing nothing of the kind, I assure him that all will be well.8

"Bigmouth Strikes Again" also appears on numerous Smiths compilations and live albums, including The World Won’t Listen, Rank, ...Best II, Singles, The Very Best of the Smiths, The Sound of the Smiths, The Smiths Singles Box and Complete, as well as Morrissey’s solo live album Live at Earls Court.

“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and the Rolling Stones Connection

The Rolling Stones had long occupied a prominent place among Johnny Marr’s many musical influences. Their appeal was such that it extended beyond their recordings to the very manner in which the Smiths operated. Marr has recalled looking to the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the Stones’ original manager, Andrew Loog Oldham,9 and founding member Brian Jones as a model when assembling the Smiths in 1982. Even Marr’s relationship with Morrissey was in part guided by the dynamic he observed between Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. Given this, it is perhaps inevitable that the Stones would find their way into his compositions.10 In writing “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” Marr drew directly upon their 1968 single “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,”11 seeking to emulate its spirited exuberance and raw energy:

With “Bigmouth Strikes Again”, I was trying to write my “Jumping Jack Flash”. I wanted something that was a rush all the way through, without a distinct middle eight as such. I thought the guitar breaks should be percussive, not too pretty or cordial - I wanted a cheap, Les Paul sort of sound. The main riff is based on an Am shape, with a capo at the 4th fret. I buried this one little guitar part in just the right place, so it sounds like overtones of the main part, but it’s really there. On the first of the two breaks, I’m playing slide through an AMS harmonizer, really high. For the second one, I used a Gibson Les Paul Black Beauty and a Rickenbacker together, playing a regular Em shape, but it’s sampled and triggered off the snare drum roll.12

While Marr hasn’t spoken of any additional influences on his composition, it has been noted that there is a striking similarity between the opening figures in “Bigmouth” and a portion of the intro of Heart’s13 “Crazy on You.”14 Indeed, it is somewhat difficult to distinguish between the two. Whether the resemblance is intentional or purely coincidental remains a matter of debate. Listen to the opening of “Crazy on You” below, beginning at 0:37, and arrive at your own conclusion:

For all the speculation surrounding other possible influences, Marr’s own assessment of “Bigmouth Strikes Again” leaves little doubt as to the musical tradition he deliberately sought to evoke. Indeed, he regarded the song as perhaps the closest the Smiths had come to capturing the sound of his early musical heroes, while retaining the distinctive character that set the Smiths apart. As he later reflected:

It’s a great song to play live. It’s as close as getting to the sound of my heroes as we came; the early Rolling Stones. There’s no other single like it it’s a good example of our quirkiness.

The Bigmouth and the Martyr

Morrissey used the song as a vehicle both to mock and antagonize the music press, whose growing tendency to make much ado about nearly everything he said had become a source of considerable irritation.15 Within a cycle of provocation and retreat, Morrissey’s narrator voices two rather violent declarations (”I’d like to smash every tooth in your head” and “By rights you should be bludgeoned in your bed”), only to retreat with the explanation that he was “only joking.” This paradigm of aggression and defense renders the song more comic than credible, but also guarantees precisely the reaction that Morrissey sought.

Morrissey’s comparison of himself to Joan of Arc, the French Catholic saint burned at the stake in 1431, is expressed in a manner that is patently absurd yet sufficiently outrageous to jar the listener. By comparing himself to a Catholic martyr, he recasts himself as a persecuted victim: “Now I know how Joan of Arc felt / As the flames rose to her Roman nose / And her Walkman started to melt.” This image of saintly martyrdom is immediately blurred by the reference to a “Roman nose” as well as the preposterous description of a melting Walkman, later replaced by an equally improbable hearing aid, some five centuries before either device existed.

The refrain provides a final layer of wildly theatrical self-reproach, with the narrator declaring himself unfit to take his place within the human race. Yet the track’s title itself dispels any notion that the narrator’s remorse will last...Bigmouth will inevitably strike again. Morrissey manages to cast his narrator as provocateur, victim and critic of his own behavior, caught in a cycle that he understands but seems unable, or unwilling, to break. There is something remarkably prescient about this portrayal, for the ensuing decades would see Morrissey himself repeatedly embroiled in controversy, alternately provoking his critics and protesting the hostility of their response, as though the character he had created in the song had become inseparable from the man himself. The joke, however, appears to have been lost on many journalists at the time of the song’s release.16

Morrissey later explained:

I would call it a parody if that sounded less like self-celebration, which it definitely wasn’t. It was just a really funny song.17

Evidently in on the joke, Mike Joyce later quipped:

What a fantastic title – one of Mozzer’s better ones. And with this song, you can see why he made journalists cream their pants. Listen to the lyrical content. He was a one-off.18

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- Ian Pye writing for NME1

Forty years after its appearance as the closing track on The Queen Is Dead, “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” remains one of the more memorable, though perhaps not the most revered, songs in the Smiths’ catalogue. Yet its significance extends well beyond the unlikely marriage of melodic beauty and lyrical farce. In its own peculiar way, the song represents a milestone in the creative partnership between Morrissey and Marr, revealing a confidence and mastery of their craft that allowed them to venture into territory where the risk was not controversy, but ridicule.

Songs such as “Suffer Little Children” and “Meat Is Murder” had already demonstrated the Smiths’ willingness to court controversy through their unorthodox and unsettling subject matter. “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others”, however, presented an altogether different artistic gamble. Its apparent triviality might easily have been dismissed as evidence of creative complacency, or of songwriters resting on their laurels. Set against the album’s emotional and thematic richness, it might even have threatened to diminish an otherwise outstanding work.

What might have amounted to little more than a throwaway novelty was transformed into something genuinely beguiling, its absurdity rendered inseparable from its musical elegance. Far from undermining the album, “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” provides a delightfully unexpected conclusion - a perfectly judged musical amuse-bouche, served at the end rather than the beginning of the feast. It is a reversal entirely in keeping with the song’s playful disregard for convention, leaving the listener with a smile rather than a sigh.

A Song That Dropped From Heaven

More than a quarter-century after its conception, Johnny Marr revealed the song’s genesis in a 2011 interview:

“I’d ride round there [Morrissey’s home] on my Yamaha DT 175 and post them [a cassette containing the recorded demo of a musical composition] through his letterbox [...] ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’ was done that way. All the music for that came in one wave while I was watching telly with the sound down. Some things just drop out of the heavens, and ‘Some Girls’… was one of them.”2

The Smiths recorded the song along with the other tracks for their next album, The Queen Is Dead, at Jacobs Studio in Surrey in the autumn of 1985. Morrissey and Johnny Marr produced the recording, with Stephen Street serving as recording engineer.

One can only imagine the surprise with which Marr, Rourke and Joyce greeted Morrissey’s lyrical creation. Reflecting on the song’s unlikely subject matter, Mike Joyce remarked that “only Morrissey could get away with that lyric.” Marr, meanwhile, confessed to being taken aback by the song’s title: “It wasn’t what I expected for the music, but who would expect that?”3

A Melody Bigger Than Its Words

Beginning with the unusual fade-in and fade-out of its introduction, the recording bears the distinctive imprint of engineer Stephen Street, who recalled:

“The song, as it was, just faded in, so I thought we had to do something a bit more interesting, [...] Basically, I put all the reverb on the drums up so it sounded like it was coming in from some large hall, and then faded it down really quickly. Then I took all the reverb back off and faded it up again. The effect was supposed to be like the music in a hall somewhere, it goes away, then it comes back and it’s nice and clean and dry. A bit like opening a door, closing it, then opening it again and walking in.”4

Once the music emerges in full clarity, Johnny Marr’s jangling guitar, with its fluid phrases, produces a sound that is predominantly wistful, yet occasionally playful, carrying the melody forward at a slightly frenetic pace. Andy Rourke’s remarkably nimble bass playing and Mike Joyce’s measured drumming provide an assured rhythmic foundation. There is a certain elegance to the arrangement, with Marr’s intricately woven guitar figures lending the song an almost dreamlike melancholy.

At the risk of diminishing Morrissey’s lyrical contribution, one cannot help but wonder what character the song might have assumed had it been conceived as an instrumental. Such speculation, however, speaks less to any perceived imbalance between Marr’s composition and Morrissey’s vocal and lyrical contributions than to the singularly evocative atmosphere of the music itself. Indeed, the same question might reasonably be asked of much of the Smiths’ catalogue, so frequently did Marr’s compositions possess a beauty and inventiveness capable of commanding the listener’s attention entirely on their own terms.

Listen to the instrumental version of “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” at the following link:

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- François de La Rochefoucauld

A Necessary Preface

This is perhaps the most challenging essay I have written, and for reasons that extend well beyond its subject matter. I suspect that some readers will find its arguments uncomfortable, perhaps even objectionable, particularly where they challenge opinions and judgements formed and solidified over many years. I regret any offence that might arise from what follows, for causing offence is neither my intention nor my purpose. Nevertheless, I believe the questions raised here deserve serious consideration, even if the conclusions prove unwelcome to some.

My greater concern is that what follows might be misconstrued as a personal attack upon Johnny Marr, or as evidence of some lingering animus towards Morrissey’s former musical partner. Nothing could be further from the truth. I also recognize that my expressions of admiration for Marr might appear self-serving in an essay that subjects his subsequent career to considerable scrutiny. Nevertheless, that admiration is genuine, and the point deserves to be made unequivocally.

Without Johnny Marr, there would have been no Smiths, certainly not the Smiths as we know them. This is not intended to diminish Morrissey’s indispensable contribution, but rather to acknowledge a proposition that seems to me beyond reasonable dispute. Marr’s exceptional musical gifts, his imagination, inventiveness and seemingly instinctive understanding of melody and arrangement were fundamental to the creation of a body of work that, during a few remarkable years in the 1980s, transformed the landscape of British independent music and established a legacy whose influence continues to be felt nearly four decades later.

It is precisely because I regard Marr as a musician of such exceptional talent, indeed, as something approaching a musical genius, that the course of his subsequent career presents so intriguing a question. What follows is not an attempt to elevate Morrissey at Marr’s expense, nor to adjudicate between two contrasting personalities whose differences have become increasingly conspicuous with the passage of time. Rather, it is an examination of the curious divergence in their artistic fortunes after 1987, and of the considerable evidence suggesting that Morrissey has enjoyed the more successful independent recording career. That conclusion need not diminish Marr’s achievements, nor does it settle the question of their relative artistic merits. It does, however, invite consideration of a more intriguing possibility: that the singular creative partnership they once shared may have been considerably more consequential to one of them than to the other.

The Paradox of Johnny Marr

Earlier this week, Johnny Marr received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Sky Arts Awards,2 the latest in a succession of honors recognizing the talent and influence of one of the most accomplished guitarists of his generation. Among these are the Ivor Novello Inspiration Award in 2010, an honorary doctorate from the University of Salford in 2012, the NME Godlike Genius Award in 2013 and the BOSS Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. Few would begrudge him any of these distinctions. His contribution to British popular music is beyond dispute, and his career, spanning more than four decades, has been characterized by an admirable industriousness, musical versatility and seemingly undiminished enthusiasm for his craft. Yet this latest honor invites a question that is perhaps rather less comfortable than the customary expressions of congratulation might suggest: what, precisely, is the nature of Marr’s lifetime achievement?

For all the recordings he has made, the musicians with whom he has collaborated and the various projects to which he has lent his considerable talents, the foundations of Marr’s reputation remain rooted almost exclusively in a remarkably brief period between 1982 and 1987, when he and Morrissey formed one of the most extraordinary songwriting partnerships in the history of British popular music. Those five years produced a body of work whose originality, melodic invention and emotional resonance have scarcely diminished with the passage of time. Nearly four decades later, the songs retain a vitality that many of their contemporaries’ recordings have long since surrendered.

What makes Marr’s subsequent career so intriguing is not its failure, for by almost any conventional measure it has been a successful one. Rather, it is the curious disparity between the prodigious creativity of his youth and the comparatively modest artistic legacy of everything that followed. He has continued to write, record, collaborate and perform, often to considerable acclaim. Yet one searches his post-Smiths catalogue for a composition possessing the unmistakable brilliance of “This Charming Man”, the radical originality of “How Soon Is Now?” or the aching beauty of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”, and finds remarkably little that invites comparison.

This is not to dismiss his later recordings, many of which are accomplished and some genuinely excellent. But there is a difference between making good music and creating something whose significance extends far beyond the circumstances of its creation. Marr has done both, although the latter achievement appears to belong overwhelmingly to his years with the Smiths.

Five Extraordinary Years

To understand this disparity, one must consider the remarkable concentration of musical invention that characterized Marr’s work with the Smiths.

Between 1982 and 1987, Marr developed a musical vocabulary that was at once immediately recognizable and remarkably difficult to categorize. His guitar playing drew upon a bewildering assortment of influences, from the intricate picking of folk musicians to the rhythmic sensibilities of funk, the melodic sophistication of 1960s pop and the atmospheric possibilities of contemporary post-punk. Rather than sounding like exercises in musical eclecticism, the resulting compositions possessed an individuality that transcended their constituent influences.

Consider the exuberant, interlocking guitar figures of “This Charming Man”, the astonishing atmospheric construction of “How Soon Is Now?”, the delicate melodic architecture of “Back to the Old House” or the sweeping romanticism of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”. These are not merely examples of accomplished guitar playing. They are compositions whose musical identities are so distinctive that a handful of notes is often sufficient to identify them.

Nor was Marr’s achievement confined to a particular style or musical temperament. The Smiths could move from the breathless urgency of “The Headmaster Ritual” to the melancholy of “I Know It’s Over”, from the playful exuberance of “Ask” to the unsettling beauty of “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me”, without ever sacrificing their unmistakable identity.

Of particular note is the speed with which this body of work emerged. Four studio albums, a succession of remarkable singles and an abundance of exceptional B-sides appeared within a period scarcely longer than the time many contemporary artists devote to producing two albums. The sheer concentration of memorable compositions suggests a creative partnership operating at an almost preternatural level of inspiration.

Yet Marr’s musical inventiveness, for all its brilliance, tells only part of the story. Much of the Smiths’ enduring appeal resides in the relationship between his compositions and Morrissey’s words, each lending the other qualities that neither might otherwise have possessed.

That relationship lies at the heart of the question surrounding Marr’s subsequent career.

Thirty-Nine Years of Respectability

Following his departure from the Smiths in 1987, Marr embarked upon a musical journey that has been as varied as it has been industrious. He worked with the Pretenders, became an important musical presence in The The, established Electronic with Bernard Sumner of Joy Division and New Order fame, and subsequently participated in projects involving the Healers,3 Modest Mouse and the Cribs. Alongside these collaborations came his own solo recordings, soundtrack work and innumerable contributions to the music of other artists.

His ability to adapt his playing to different musical environments is impressive, as is his willingness to collaborate with musicians of widely varying sensibilities. Electronic, in particular, produced music of genuine distinction. “Getting Away with It”, with its memorable melody and polished arrangement, remains an accomplished example of late-1980s British pop. His work with The The likewise demonstrated his capacity to contribute meaningfully to an established artistic vision, while his involvement with Modest Mouse introduced his distinctive guitar playing to another generation of listeners.

His subsequent solo career has yielded several well-received albums (not to mention three number-one singles on the Official Vinyl Singles Chart456), including The Messenger (2013), Playland, Call the Comet and Fever Dreams Pts 1–4. His latest album, The Age of Everything, released earlier this month, debuted at number 5 on the UK Albums Chart.7 These recordings reveal an artist fully engaged with the possibilities of contemporary music, still capable of constructing appealing melodies and interesting arrangements, and certainly not content merely to reproduce the sound of his former group.

Yet admiration for these accomplishments should not prevent a more searching assessment of their significance.

Where, among this substantial body of work, are the songs that have entered the broader cultural imagination with anything approaching the force of his Smiths compositions? Which recordings are likely to be rediscovered, cherished and reinterpreted by listeners who have not yet been born?

There are, of course, listeners for whom Marr’s later music holds considerable personal importance. His admirers can reasonably point to particular recordings as evidence of his continuing artistic vitality. Musical judgement is necessarily subjective, and the passage of time has a habit of confounding confident predictions about what posterity will preserve.

Nevertheless, the contrast between Marr’s earlier and later work becomes particularly apparent in concert. His audiences may respond appreciatively to his solo recordings, yet performances of “This Charming Man”, “How Soon Is Now?” or “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” invariably elicit an altogether different degree of enthusiasm.

These songs have accompanied listeners through adolescence, romance, disappointment and the innumerable private dramas of ordinary life. They have become part of the emotional histories of successive generations, acquiring a significance that extends far beyond their musical construction.

Such a phenomenon is hardly unique to Marr. Nostalgia is a powerful force, and many established performers discover that audiences reserve their greatest affection for the recordings that first established their reputations. Yet the persistence of this contrast, nearly four decades after the Smiths dissolved, raises a question that nostalgia alone may not adequately answer: why has so little of Marr’s subsequent music achieved a comparable hold upon the public imagination?

Perhaps the explanation lies not in any diminution of his abilities, but in the nature of the creative partnership that first brought them to prominence.

The Missing Ingredient

How could one of the most inventive musicians of his generation devote nearly forty years to a prolific and accomplished career without quite recovering the alchemy that distinguished his earliest work?

The answer may be considerably simpler than the question suggests, although it leads to a rather uncomfortable conclusion: perhaps Johnny Marr needed Morrissey more than Morrissey needed Johnny Marr.

At first glance, such a proposition might seem preposterous. Marr was, after all, the musician in their partnership, a guitarist and composer of exceptional imagination whose melodies and arrangements supplied the musical foundations upon which Morrissey’s words were set. Morrissey, by contrast, was not a musician in any conventional sense. He neither played an instrument nor possessed the technical vocabulary ordinarily associated with musical composition. Yet there was something in the peculiar relationship between these two profoundly different individuals that enabled Marr’s creativity to flourish with an intensity he has never quite replicated.

Perhaps it was Morrissey’s singular lyrical imagination, his instinct for the unexpected, or his ability to introduce an element of emotional ambiguity into music that might otherwise have remained merely beautiful. Perhaps it was the tension between Marr’s melodic exuberance and Morrissey’s frequently morbid preoccupations, or the challenge of accommodating a vocalist whose phrasing and sensibilities bore little resemblance to those of a conventional pop singer.

The Smiths’ greatest songs frequently derived their power from precisely these contrasts. Marr’s music could be exuberant, romantic, delicate or playful, while Morrissey’s words introduced loneliness, sexual ambiguity, resentment, mordant humor and an almost theatrical preoccupation with disappointment. Rather than pulling the compositions apart, these opposing sensibilities gave them their distinctive character.

“Girlfriend in a Coma” offers a particularly striking illustration. Its deceptively buoyant arrangement appears almost blissfully indifferent to the morbid drama unfolding within it. Yet neither the music nor the lyric would possess quite the same character without the other. Their apparent incompatibility becomes the source of the song’s curious brilliance.

Such creative relationships are difficult to explain and perhaps impossible to manufacture. They depend upon something more elusive than technical proficiency, shared musical tastes or even mutual admiration. Sometimes the collision of two artistic personalities produces an outcome that neither could reasonably have anticipated.

It is therefore conceivable that Morrissey provided Marr with something more consequential than musical companionship: a particular creative challenge, a distinctive identity and an outlet through which his gifts could find their fullest expression. This remains speculative, of course. But Marr’s continued technical accomplishment and musical versatility, set against the singular achievements of his Smiths years, make the possibility difficult to dismiss.

It is almost as though the genius remains intact, but the means by which it once announced itself so unmistakably have somehow fallen silent.

Morrissey: The Inconvenient Comparison

Morrissey’s subsequent career presents a rather different picture.

Having lost the musical partner whose compositions had provided the setting for his words, he nevertheless embarked upon a solo career that quickly established an identity of its own. Working with a succession of musicians and composers, he continued to produce songs of considerable distinction, sometimes rivalling the finest achievements of his former group.

“Suedehead” and “Everyday Is Like Sunday” announced almost immediately that Morrissey’s creative identity could survive the dissolution of the Smiths. Later recordings such as “November Spawned a Monster”, “The Last of the Famous International Playboys” and “Now My Heart Is Full”, among many others, demonstrated that his lyrical imagination remained capable of producing memorable work within musical settings quite different from those fashioned by Marr.

Indeed, there is little point in avoiding the obvious: measured by the breadth of his recorded output, his commercial achievements and his ability to sustain a distinct artistic identity, Morrissey has enjoyed a considerably more successful career as a solo artist than Johnny Marr. His nearly four decades of work have amounted to something far more substantial than an extended exercise in revisiting the Smiths. His artistic vision has evolved and expanded, embracing musical styles, lyrical preoccupations and creative ambitions that have established him as a significant artist in his own right, rather than merely the former singer of the Smiths.

His catalogue is hardly without blemish. There have been misjudgments, uninspired recordings and occasional lapses of artistic prowess. Some albums have been considerably more successful than others, and there are listeners, including devoted admirers, who believe that his finest achievements belong to the distant past. Such judgements are perfectly legitimate. Musical appreciation is subjective, and longevity alone is no guarantee of artistic vitality.

His willingness to venture beyond the musical conventions of the Smiths is particularly evident in Southpaw Grammar, an album whose expansive arrangements, unconventional structures and occasional abrasiveness represented a considerable departure from the melodic economy with which Morrissey had first established his reputation. Whether one admires the record is ultimately a matter of taste. What is rather more difficult to dispute is the determination to explore territory that might have seemed incompatible with the expectations of his established audience.

This does not mean that Morrissey achieved everything independently. His subsequent success depended upon the talents of musicians and songwriting partners whose contributions deserve proper recognition. Stephen Street, Alain Whyte, Boz Boorer, Jesse Tobias and others have played important roles in shaping his post-Smiths musical identity. Indeed, the willingness and ability to work productively with different composers may be central to understanding the disparity between the two former partners.

Morrissey’s creative identity resided principally in his words, his voice, his phrasing and the peculiar emotional universe he constructed around his songs. These qualities could be brought to bear upon compositions supplied by different musicians. Marr’s gifts, by contrast, lay in the construction of melodies, arrangements and instrumental textures whose fullest expression may have depended upon the particular artistic personality with which they were combined.

The dissolution of their partnership may therefore have affected them in fundamentally different ways. Morrissey lost a composer of exceptional gifts but retained the means of expressing his distinctive sensibility through others. Marr lost a collaborator whose unusual imagination may have been essential to transforming his musical ideas into something greater than their individual merits.

This is not an argument that Morrissey was the superior artist. Such a judgement would reduce their creative partnership to a contest between its participants. Rather, the question is why two musicians who accomplished so much together appear to have followed such different creative trajectories once separated.

The Curious Construction of Johnny Marr

There is another dimension to Marr’s subsequent reputation, one that concerns not his music but his public persona.

Over the years, the contrast between the two former collaborators has become increasingly pronounced. Notably, Morrissey has acquired a reputation for provocative statements, political controversy and an apparent indifference to the consequences of offending prevailing opinion. Marr, by contrast, is generally presented as an agreeable, thoughtful and socially conscientious figure, a musician whose public attitudes appear considerably more compatible with contemporary cultural expectations.

Some of this distinction undoubtedly reflects genuine differences in personality and conviction. Marr has expressed political opinions and social concerns independently of Morrissey, and there is no reason to assume that his public positions are insincere merely because they happen to accord with those of many of his admirers.

Nevertheless, one cannot help wondering whether the favorable reception Marr enjoys in certain quarters owes something to the increasingly unfavorable reputation of his former songwriting partner.

Personal and political considerations can sometimes intrude upon judgements of artistic merit. Morrissey’s controversial pronouncements have made him an object of considerable hostility, while Marr’s willingness to distance himself from those views has reinforced his standing as the more acceptable representative of the Smiths’ legacy. One might reasonably ask whether his contemporary reputation offers some admirers an additional reassurance: that, whatever one thinks of Morrissey, Johnny Marr is emphatically not like him.

There is nothing inherently objectionable about this distinction. Marr is entitled to his convictions and has no obligation to defend his former collaborator. Nor would it be fair to suggest that his public positions are merely calculated expressions of fashionable opinion. The difficulty arises only when approval of an artist’s character begins to substitute for an assessment of his work.

Indeed, there is a certain irony in the extent to which Marr’s public identity remains connected to Morrissey. Nearly four decades after their partnership ended, even their disagreements can serve to reinforce the association. The Smiths remain central not only to the appreciation of Marr’s music, but also, at times, to the construction of his contemporary public persona.

Whether this reflects Marr’s intentions, the preferences of journalists or the expectations of audiences is difficult to determine. What matters, particularly in the context of a Lifetime Achievement Award, is that cultural approval and artistic accomplishment remain distinct considerations. Marr’s musical legacy must ultimately be judged on its own merits.

A Lifetime Achievement, or the Achievement of a Lifetime?

There is nothing unreasonable about celebrating a musician whose most consequential work was completed early in his career. Marr accomplished more between 1982 and 1987 than most musicians could reasonably hope to achieve in several lifetimes. Those years alone may be sufficient to secure his place among the most important figures in British popular music.

The question is whether the remarkable achievements of his youth should be understood as the beginning of an equally remarkable artistic journey, or as the brief, almost miraculous culmination of a creative partnership whose singular creative possibilities Marr has never subsequently managed to recapture. Marr’s later career has been distinguished by versatility, productivity and genuine accomplishment. Yet its defining artistic legacy remains concentrated within a period that ended before his twenty-fourth birthday.

There is, however, a final irony, and perhaps the most tantalizing of all.

Unlike so many artists whose defining creative achievements belong to a vanished period of their lives, Marr may still possess the means of recovering something of what made his earliest work so exceptional. The other half of that partnership is, after all, still alive, still writing and still performing.

One need not entertain the prospect of a Smiths reunion, with its attendant expectations, commercial considerations and inevitable disappointments, to contemplate the possibility of Morrissey and Marr writing together again. Indeed, the distinction is an important one. A reunion would invite the two men to revisit their past; a renewed songwriting partnership would challenge them to create something entirely new.

Whether the peculiar chemistry of their youth could be rekindled after nearly forty years is impossible to know. They are different men, shaped by different experiences, and the circumstances that once brought their creative instincts into such remarkable alignment cannot simply be reconstructed. There is every possibility that a renewed collaboration would prove disappointing. But there is also the tantalizing possibility that the mysterious affinity which produced so much memorable music was never entirely extinguished, merely interrupted. For a musician whose greatest achievements are so closely associated with his youth, there would be something wonderfully fitting about such an experiment.

Marr has spent much of the intervening period demonstrating that he can make music with almost anyone. Perhaps the one question he has yet to answer is whether he can still make extraordinary music with the one person who once seemed capable of drawing it from him almost effortlessly.

And should that unlikely collaboration ever produce something worthy of their shared legacy, it might constitute a lifetime achievement in the truest sense: not another celebration of what Johnny Marr accomplished in his youth, but the unexpected discovery that his greatest creative partnership had not, after all, exhausted its possibilities.

“Over the last few years I’ve heard ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ in shops and people’s cars, and I’m always surprised by how good it sounds.”

- Johnny Marr1

From Good Earth To Wool Hall

The origins of “Girlfriend in a Coma” can probably be traced from late 1986 to the opening weeks of 1987. By January of the New Year, amid London’s historic winter freeze, the Smiths initially recorded the song at Tony Visconti’s Good Earth Studios in Soho, London during the sessions for “Sheila Take a Bow.” Imbued with a 1960s-inspired guitar-pop arrangement propelled by a gently lilting, rocksteady flavored2 rhythm, their initial interpretation was markedly different from the version eventually released. This uncharacteristic approach was ultimately discarded. Sourced from a record-company CD-R assembled for an unrealized reissue project, this early version surfaced in 2010 on the bootleg LP The Smiths.

Listen to the Good Earth Studios recording of “Girlfriend in a Coma” in the following link:

That spring, the Smiths revisited the song when they convened at Wool Hall Studios in Bath for the Strangeways, Here We Come sessions. This time around, the earlier arrangement gave way to a softer, predominantly acoustic treatment that provided an effective counterpoint to Morrissey’s decidedly unsettling lyrics. This definitive recording was produced by Stephen Street, with contributions from Morrissey and Johnny Marr.3

Listen to the definitive version of the song here:

A Single, A Sleeve, A Muse

Released on 10 August 1987, “Girlfriend in a Coma” was the first single from the Smiths’ forthcoming album. Its B-sides featured a cover of Cilla Black’s “Work Is a Four-Letter Word” and the Morrissey/Marr composition “I Keep Mine Hidden,” both recorded during the band’s final session at London’s Firehouse Studios in May 1987, with the band’s live sound engineer, Grant Showbiz,4 serving as producer. The two tracks were subsequently mixed by Stephen Street. The single reached a respectable number 13 on the UK Singles Chart.

Unsurprisingly, “Girlfriend In A Coma” received little airplay on BBC Radio owing to the subject matter of its lyrics. As Morrissey later commented to an audience after performing the song in concert long after the demise of the Smiths, "You're not really supposed to like those songs. They're very depressing and not supposed to be played on radio."5

The single’s cover features the image of English playwright and screenwriter Shelagh Delaney, marking her second appearance on a Smiths record sleeve, having previously appeared on the Louder Than Bombs compilation earlier that year. The image was taken from the jacket of a 1959 edition of Delaney’s celebrated play A Taste of Honey.

It would hardly be an understatement to say that Delaney was a profound influence on Morrissey, whose early lyrics borrowed extensively from her work, particularly in “Reel Around the Fountain” and “This Night Has Opened My Eyes”. In a 1986 interview with the NME, Morrissey acknowledged his debt: “I’ve never made any secret of the fact that at least 50 per cent of my reason for writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney.”6

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An Old Hand, a New Song

Earmarked as the Smiths’ next single, “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby” was recorded in early October 1986 at Mayfair Studios in London’s West End, alongside “London” and “Half a Person.” These sessions also marked the final studio appearance of Craig Gannon, the so-called “Fifth Smith,” with the band.1

The sessions were particularly intriguing for the involvement of both John Porter and Stephen Street, each working on different tracks. Porter produced “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby,” while Street performed double duty on “London” and “Half a Person,” sharing production responsibilities with Morrissey and Johnny Marr while also serving as recording engineer.

Despite having produced the Smiths’ debut studio album and a string of successful singles, John Porter was conspicuously absent when the band assembled to record Meat Is Murder in the autumn of 1984. The circumstances of his departure remain somewhat ambiguous. Johnny Marr subsequently portrayed the change as a natural progression towards greater artistic independence, while engineer Stephen Street recalled being approached by Geoff Travis with the news that Morrissey and Marr wished to produce the album themselves. Porter, however, has offered a rather different recollection, maintaining that Travis sacked him following disagreements over the production of “How Soon Is Now?”2 Complicating matters further was Morrissey’s apparent unease with the increasingly close working relationship between Porter and Marr.

Porter’s absence, however, was not permanent. Having helped Morrissey and Marr salvage “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” in December 1985, albeit strictly as recording engineer, he resumed production duties on several Smiths recordings in 1986, including the singles “Panic” and “Ask.”

It was against this backdrop that Porter was brought in to produce the Smiths’ next single in October 1986, which progressed as far as the manufacture of test pressings before “Shoplifters of the World Unite” was chosen in its place, appearing as the Smiths’ 17th single in January 1987.

The Song Earned It

While passed over as a single, “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby” quickly saw release on the Smiths’ The World Won’t Listen UK compilation LP in late February 1987. Barely a month later, however, North American listeners received something slightly different on the Louder Than Bombs compilation, which contained an alternate mix of the song that is near imperceptibly slower and having fewer overdubs, ensuring that two distinct versions had entered the Smiths’ catalogue within the space of just five weeks.

Listen to the original UK version here:

The North American mix can be heard here:

A remastered version of the song later appeared on the 2008 compilation The Sound of the Smiths, while both the original UK and US versions of the song are contained on 2011s Complete compilation album.

More interestingly, the song continued to follow the former Smiths into their subsequent careers. Morrissey returned to it on stage, with a performance from his Warsaw concert on 7 July 2009 appearing on the limited-edition two-CD version of his Swords compilation album later that year.

Smiths collaborator Kirsty MacColl also made the song her own, recording a version featuring Johnny Marr on guitar for the soundtrack to the 1988 film She’s Having a Baby. Her rendition subsequently appeared as the B-side of her 1989 single “Free World” and as a bonus track on the CD edition of her album Kite, released that same year.

Marr himself would eventually reclaim the song in concert. A performance recorded at London’s fabled Roundhouse venue on 11 November 2018 was released later that year on Comet Tripper: Live at the Roundhouse. The song surfaced yet again for Record Store Day in April 2025 on Look Out Live!, recorded at his concert at the Hammersmith Apollo on 12 April 2024.

A Little More Suffering, Baby

Lyrically, “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby” finds Morrissey at his most tart, sarcastic and mischievously self-pitying. Its central conceit is a deliciously cruel inversion of conventional encouragement: love, companionship and even fame are presented as privileges that must be earned through prolonged suffering, their denial explained by the sufferer’s apparent failure to endure quite enough misery. The repeated promise of an explanation only compounds the absurdity, culminating in a patronizing refrain that offers neither comfort nor enlightenment. Even the ostensibly affectionate forms of address, “baby” and “son,” acquire an unmistakably condescending quality.

Yet beneath the humor lies a more personal grievance. As the narrative shifts from frustrated romantic longing to thwarted ambition, and finally to the recollection of being physically restrained and admonished, Morrissey appears to assume the voice of those who have dismissed his own aspirations. What initially sounds like advice dispensed by an insufferably knowing narrator gradually reveals itself as something closer to a remembered humiliation. The result is a characteristically Morrisseyan mixture of wounded pride, theatrical indignation and caustic wit.

The Joy of Resentment

Musically, “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby” is a quintessential Smiths composition. Marr and Gannon’s interwoven guitars combine shimmering arpeggios with briskly strummed chords, while Andy Rourke’s fluid, melodic bass lines provide a lively counterpoint. Mike Joyce supplies a forceful rhythmic foundation, shifting into double-time on the snare shortly after the two-minute mark. Morrissey’s assured, almost cheerful vocal delivery complements the arrangement, bringing an unexpected lightness to words otherwise steeped in disappointment and resentment.

It is precisely this contrast that makes the recording so engaging. The dark sarcasm of the lyrics sits comfortably, if improbably, alongside the bright, propulsive instrumentation, transforming what might otherwise have been an exercise in self-pity into something unexpectedly playful. Indeed, Morrissey makes resentment sound positively joyous.

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"It is a direct statement. Of all the political topics to be scrutinised people are still disturbingly vague about the treatment of animals. People still seem to believe that meat is a particular substance not at all connected to animals playing in the field over there. People don't realise how gruesomely and frighteningly the animal gets to the plate..1
- Morrissey

The ninth and final track on the Smiths’ second studio album, Meat Is Murder, the title song is a six-minute dirge lamenting the slaughter of animals for human consumption.

The decision to conclude an album with such harrowing subject matter was not without precedent. A year earlier, the Smiths had closed their debut LP with “Suffer Little Children,” an unsettling meditation on the Moors murders that amounted, in effect, to an early declaration of their unwillingness to observe the conventional boundaries of commercial pop music. With “Meat Is Murder,” however, Morrissey ventured further still. Rather than confronting an atrocity universally acknowledged as such, he challenged a practice accepted, and participated in, by much of his prospective audience.

More remarkable still, Morrissey chose its provocative declaration not merely as the title of a song, but as the name of what was only the Smiths’ second studio album, attaching the band’s identity to an uncompromising ethical position at a point when its audience was still developing. As author Tony Fletcher observed, Morrissey was prepared to risk alienating much of the Smiths’ audience, pursuing his message “without subtlety, without apology, and without guilt.” Fletcher concluded with an especially apt observation:

…at more than six minutes in length, ‘Meat is Murder’ was as unforgiving of its listeners as Morrissey was of meat-eaters.2

Composition and Recording

Like the other material recorded for Meat Is Murder, the song was written and recorded in October 1984 at Amazon Studios in Liverpool, with the Smiths assuming production duties themselves, principally under Johnny Marr’s direction, and Stephen Street serving as recording engineer. The following month, the recording travelled south to Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey for additional overdubs, before reaching Island Records’ Fallout Shelter in London, where the final mix was completed in December.3

Marr was informed of the title and concept in advance and composed something Fletcher characterized as “flat, ponderous, mechanical and ‘nasty’,” despite its unexpected 6/8 time signature. Morrissey supplied Stephen Street with a BBC sound-effects recording of cattle and asked him to create the atmosphere of an abattoir. Street supplemented the recording with additional sounds and reverse echo. Fletcher also describes Marr's lead piano melody as reminiscent of the score to a ghost film.4

Listen to the song in the following link:

Releases

In addition to its original appearance on the Smiths’ second studio album in February 1985, “Meat Is Murder” was issued as the B-side of the Netherlands-only 12-inch single “The Headmaster Ritual” that summer. This version was recorded live during the Smiths’ March 1985 concert in Oxford, England. The same Oxford recording also appeared as a B-side to “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” single released on 5 July 1985, and subsequently resurfaced on the UK CD edition of “The Headmaster Ritual” in late 1988.

The song continued to appear on subsequent Smiths compilations, beginning with The Sound of the Smiths and The Smiths Singles Box, both released in 2008 and both featuring the Oxford live recording. The original studio version finally resurfaced on the 2011 compilation Complete, while its Super Deluxe edition once again included the Oxford performance. Morrissey’s live rendition of “Meat Is Murder,” recorded at Hollywood High School in Los Angeles on 2 March 2013, was later included on his concert DVD 25 Live, released that October.

Origins of Morrissey’s Vegetarianism

The convictions expressed in “Meat Is Murder” did not originate with the album. Morrissey became a vegetarian at the age of eleven, influenced both by his mother, who was already vegetarian, and by a formative encounter with a BBC television documentary depicting the workings of an abattoir. He later reduced the principle behind his vegetarianism to a characteristically simple proposition: “if you love animals, obviously it doesn’t make sense to hurt them.”5

The documentary appears to have affected him in a deeper way than simply provoking revulsion at the slaughter itself. Confronted with the realization that the practice was not aberrant but broadly accepted, Morrissey found himself unable to reconcile his own response with that of the society around him. “I could never be a part of a society that would condone the abattoir,” he later recalled, adding that the realization left him feeling “very, very... separate.” His mother provided a sympathetic moral example; as Morrissey explained, she did not consider another living creature “inferior just because it doesn’t look like she does.” In this sense, the convictions eventually given their most uncompromising expression in “Meat Is Murder” were established long before the Smiths existed: opposition to the slaughter of animals became intertwined not only with Morrissey’s moral outlook, but also with his enduring sense of himself as standing apart from the prevailing attitudes of society.6

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From Portland Road to Pluto

Among the very first songs written by Morrissey and Johnny Marr, “What Difference Does It Make?” emerged in Marr’s attic bedroom on Portland Road in Bowdon (Greater Manchester)1 in the summer or early autumn of 1982. The song’s title may have been borrowed from Jack Kerouac’s2 1958 novel The Dharma Bums.3 Its protagonist, Ray Smith, repeatedly asks “What difference does it make?” and variations of the phrase throughout the book.4

Few songs from the Smiths’ earliest period possess a recording history quite as extensive. From late 1982 through the autumn of 1983, the song accompanied the band through virtually every stage of its early development, leaving behind an unusually large number of recordings in the process.

Beginning with sessions at Spirit and Drone Studios in Manchester, the song was subsequently recorded at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios for the Smiths’ first session on John Peel’s BBC radio 1 program, at the rehearsal space above Joe Moss’s Crazy Face shop in Manchester, during the Troy Tate album sessions at Elephant Studios in London, and finally at Pluto Studios in Manchester with John Porter. There were multiple attempts during some of these sessions, while other recordings survive only through bootlegs, private collections or, in several cases, reports of recordings that have never circulated publicly. The result is a remarkably complicated trail of demos, rehearsals, radio and studio performances, alternate takes and edits spanning almost a year.

That trail ultimately led to the John Porter recording made at Pluto Studios in October 1983 and mixed at Eden Studios in London the following month. It became the familiar version released as the Smiths’ third single in January 1984 and, shortly thereafter, on their debut album. The recordings that preceded it provide something approaching a running document of “What Difference Does It Make?” taking shape.5

The Search for the Definitive Version

The song was first professionally recorded sometime in September 1982 at Spirit Studios in Manchester’s Northern Quarter in the course of Mike Joyce’s audition as drummer for the newly minted band.6

It was next recorded at Drone Studios in Chorlton, Manchester, in December 1982 - a truly pivotal moment in the band’s formation and identity as the session marked the first time bassist Andy Rourke played with the group after being recruited by Marr. With original bassist Dale Hibbert recently dismissed and drummer Mike Joyce only newly installed,7 the Smiths were still an unstable, unfinished project; the session effectively captured the emergence of the band’s classic lineup for the first time in a professional studio setting.8

During the Drone session - courtesy of the largesse of EMI Records9 - the Smiths assembled a three-song demo: “What Difference Does It Make?”, “Handsome Devil” and “Miserable Lie,” intended to secure a contract with EMI. Unfortunately, the record label was not impressed with what they heard, and the anticipated contract did not materialize.

A very rough recording of the song, featuring only Morrissey and Marr and most likely originating from a soundcheck, surfaced within the Smiths online community in 2020. It was uploaded by an unidentified YouTube user known as “Mr Demos,” who appeared in January 2020 and released a series of purported early Smiths recordings whose authenticity has been disputed. This recording, subsequently dubbed the “Mr Demos Version,” runs 3:29. Smiths scholar DavidA believes it dates from around February 1983, although its precise date and provenance remain uncertain. Listen to the recording at the following link:

In May 1983, just after signing with Rough Trade Records and the subsequent release of their first single, “Hand in Glove,” the Smiths recorded a selection of songs, including “What Difference Does It Make?”, that they hoped to include on their anticipated debut album (which was not actually green-lighted by Rough Trade until that summer). This rather primitive recording - made on a cassette with a single stereo microphone - took place in a rehearsal room above manager Joe Moss’ Crazy Face retail shop at 70–72 Portland Street, Manchester. Troy Tate, whom Morrissey describes in Autobiography as having been “…appointed producer by Rough Trade” to work with the Smiths on their debut album, was provided with the tape, since dubbed the “Pablo Cuckoo Tape,” so that he would have a sample of the songs he would be working on in advance of going into the studio.

Listen to the Pablo Cuckoo version of the song here:

Another version of the song was recorded on 18 May 1983 for the Smiths’ first appearance on John Peel’s BBC program. The recording was produced by Roger Pusey10 and broadcast on May 31, 1983. This version of the song was later included on the compilation album Hatful of Hollow.11 Listen to the John Peel version of “What Difference Does It Make?” in the following link:

Two additional versions were recorded in July/August 1983 at London’s Elephant Studios with producer Troy Tate during the initial sessions for the Smiths’ debut album. Listen to the two Tate versions, which Morrissey later referred to, along with the other Tate recordings, as a “rash rumble,”12 here:

Interestingly, Tate’s first version contains brief snippets of Morrissey’s backing vocalizations at 0:40 and 1:40, and again at around 2:25. They seem almost to challenge the primary vocal, adding a rather unsettling quality to the track.

The second version, running only 3:23, opens with a brief vocalization by Morrissey, followed by his backing vocals beginning at around 1:36, which lend the track an almost ethereal ambience.

A reasonably good demo of the song also emerged from the Elephant Studios sessions with Tate and can be heard here:

“What Difference Does It Make,” along with the other tracks recorded in what became known as the ‘Troy Tate Sessions,’ was shelved due to the Smiths’ dissatisfaction with Tate’s efforts. Morrissey later recalled that, while it was “not Troy’s fault,” the recording had not gone well and that the band felt they “must have another shot at it,” particularly in view of the growing interest from the weekly music press. Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis agreed that the album “must be right and must be improved upon from the Troy sessions.”13

It wasn’t until Morrissey and Marr enlisted producer John Porter - who had recently produced their songs for the band’s second appearance on David Jensen’s BBC Radio 1 program in late August 1983 - that the definitive version of the song was finally recorded in October 1983 at Pluto Studios in Manchester city centre.

Additional mixing was carried out at Eden Studios in London in November 1983. Running 3:50, the finished recording contains only a vague hint of Morrissey’s backing vocalizations heard more prominently on some of the earlier versions. Listen to the definitive version here:

A 3:25 edit of the song was also mixed, with approximately 25 seconds trimmed from the instrumental outro.

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The path to the finished recording of “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” was a decidedly peripatetic one, taking the song through three studios, several iterations and a change of recording engineer before the version eventually heard on The Queen Is Dead finally emerged. Johnny Marr wrote the music in the summer of 1985 during a particularly productive burst of songwriting. He later recalled that “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” was one of three songs he wrote in a single night, alongside “I Know It’s Over” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”1 Morrissey had added the lyrics by the time the Smiths entered RAK Studios in London in September 1985 to begin recording material for The Queen Is Dead. However, the band managed to record only a rough demo of the song during these sessions.

Listen to the RAK session demo in the link below:

A more fully realized version of the song was recorded in October–November 1985 at Jacobs Studios in Surrey. Morrissey and Johnny Marr produced the track, with Stephen Street serving as recording engineer. This recording featured a trumpet2 and lyrics that differed slightly from those that would eventually appear on the album.

Listen to the Stephen Street “Trumpet” version here:

The arrangement might have taken an even more unexpected turn: Marr later recalled that Morrissey sent Linda McCartney a postcard asking whether she would contribute to the recording. “We got a polite reply saying she couldn’t do it,” he remembered. “We were ready for her to come and to sing and play keyboards on it. I wish it had happened.”3

The song was re-recorded in December 1985 at Wessex Studios in London, again with Morrissey and Marr acting as producers, but with John Porter replacing Stephen Street as recording engineer. Explanations for the re-recording have ranged from claims that the Jacobs Studios recording had been partially erased to suggestions that it contained a momentary loss of audio (a “dropout”4 in recording-studio parlance). However, given that the earlier recording has since surfaced in its entirety on bootlegs, there may have been another reason. One might reasonably surmise that the Smiths simply did not like it, particularly since the re-recording dispensed with the trumpet and featured lyrical changes. This John Porter-engineered recording became the definitive version of “Frankly, Mr. Shankly.”

Listen to the final version of the song in the link below:

Released as the second track on The Queen Is Dead on 16 June 1986, it brought to a close a recording process that had taken the song through three studios and three distinct versions.

Album Sequencing

Sandwiched between the title track and “I Know It’s Over,” the song’s placement seems particularly inspired. “The Queen Is Dead” opens the album with a ferocious indictment of institutional decay, inherited authority and the suffocating rituals of English life, while “I Know It’s Over” turns almost painfully inward, confronting loneliness, rejection and the absence of hope. Between these two considerable emotional weights sits the comparatively breezy “Frankly, Mr. Shankly,” in which the dissatisfaction remains but the stakes become smaller and considerably funnier. Marr’s jaunty music and Morrissey’s sardonic lyric allow the album to exhale after the furious opening track before descending into the emotional depths of “I Know It’s Over.” Without it between them, the opening movement of The Queen Is Dead would be considerably more oppressive.

There is also a curious thematic progression across the three songs. The adversary steadily contracts in scale: from the institutions of an entire nation, to the petty authority of the workplace, and finally to the self. Society, employer, individual; public disaffection gives way to comic personal rebellion before collapsing into private despair. “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” may be the least consequential of the three songs in what it ostensibly describes, but its very inconsequence is what makes its position on the album so effective.

Other Releases

In Germany, the song was released in October 1986 as a B-side, along with “The Draize Train,” on the 12-inch version of the “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” single, featuring the enchanting British actress Yootha Joyce on its cover. The B-side runout bears the curious inscription “BUSY TRAIN TO THE LOKOMOTION.” The record was manufactured in Germany and mastered for TELDEC by engineer Christian Stegmaier, whose identifying “CS-B-III” appears alongside the inscription in the runout. The phrase itself appears to be a playful reference to “The Draize Train,” with the conspicuously German-looking “Lokomotion” extending the railway pun. Whether Stegmaier devised the wording himself or was instructed to include it by Morrissey or someone else involved with the release remains unknown.

In addition to the version released on the original The Queen Is Dead album, the song appears on the 2011 Complete compilation album, while the earlier RAK Studios demo of “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” was officially released on the 2017 deluxe reissue of The Queen Is Dead.

Who Was Mr. Shankly?

It is generally accepted that the song is a thinly veiled jab at Rough Trade head Geoff Travis, whose already uneasy relationship with Morrissey and Marr had deteriorated badly by 1985. Increasingly frustrated by what they regarded as the label’s inadequate promotion, distribution and resources, the Smiths began exploring an early exit from their contract and retained legal counsel to help secure their release. At the heart of the dispute was a disagreement over whether the band had, in fact, satisfied its contractual obligation to deliver four albums. The Smiths regarded the forthcoming The Queen Is Dead as their fourth, counting Hatful of Hollow alongside The Smiths and Meat Is Murder. Rough Trade evidently saw things differently.

When Travis learned that the band was entertaining offers from other labels, he obtained an injunction preventing them from releasing new material elsewhere, contributing to an eight-month period in which no new Smiths records appeared. It was amid this bitter contractual standoff that “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” was written, its mock resignation concealing some very real grievances.

The impasse was finally broken in the summer of 1986, when an agreement was reached that permitted the Smiths to sign with EMI while still requiring them to deliver one final album to Rough Trade. The EMI deal was structured as a forward-signing agreement: it would take effect only after the band’s remaining obligations to Rough Trade had been fully satisfied. There was a final irony. By the time Strangeways, Here We Come was released in September 1987, effectively bringing the Smiths’ relationship with Rough Trade to an end, there was no longer a Smiths to move to EMI.

Johnny Marr himself lent considerable weight to the Travis interpretation. Recalling the song in 2011, he remarked, “Lyrically it was supposed to be about Geoff Travis. I don’t know whether it is or not.”5 The qualification is notable: Marr evidently understood Travis to have been the intended target, while stopping short of claiming any certainty about Morrissey’s meaning.

For decades, “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” was widely understood as an attack on Geoff Travis, an interpretation Morrissey eventually rejected outright. In 2021, he dismissed the idea with characteristic brevity: “Frankly, Mr. Shankly is not about Geoff Travis.” Assuming Morrissey was being perfectly frank, the identity of the titular Mr. Shankly remains unknown.6

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The third track on the Smiths’ final studio album, Strangeways, Here We Come, “Death of a Disco Dancer” is distinguished by its dark, experimental sound, with echoes of the Beatles’ more adventurous late-1960s work, as well as by being the only Smiths song to feature Morrissey playing a musical instrument.

The song is believed to have taken shape either shortly before or during the March–April 1987 sessions for Strangeways, Here We Come at Wool Hall Studios in Bath, England, where Stephen Street produced the album with close involvement from Johnny Marr and Morrissey.1

A Turn Toward Darkness

Strangeways, Here We Come was released on 28 September 1987. Within the album’s sequence, “Death of a Disco Dancer” arrives at an intriguing point in its emotional descent. “A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours” opens with a sense of resilience and renewed possibility, while “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish” immediately complicates that optimism with failure and irresolution. “Death of a Disco Dancer” then broadens the mood into something darker and more philosophical, treating love, peace and harmony as ideals perhaps attainable only “in the next world.”

Its ominous, increasingly disordered sound also marks the album’s first major break from conventional pop momentum. What comes next only deepens the effect: “Girlfriend in a Coma” retains death as its subject but recasts it with macabre levity, while the remaining tracks increasingly dwell on violence, alienation, failed love and emotional exhaustion. Whether intentional or not, the placement of “Death of a Disco Dancer” makes it feel like an early hinge in the album, the point at which its tentative optimism begins to give way to something altogether more fatalistic.

The Sound of the Song

The track opens with the dissonant plucking and scraping of Johnny Marr’s guitar strings, joined by Andy Rourke’s slow, ominous bass, the two combining to foreshadow the darkness that gradually envelops the song.

The individual performances are integral to the song’s gathering tension. Marr largely sets aside his familiar bright, intricate guitar figures, instead using the instrument to create texture and abrasion. Rourke’s deep, prominent bass provides a remarkably melodic counterweight, holding the music together as it grows more unruly. Mike Joyce’s drumming, initially restrained, steadily gathers force until it becomes one of the coda’s most powerful features, his emphatic fills and crashing cymbals helping drive the song towards its overwhelming climax.

“Death of a Disco Dancer” possesses an unnerving quality, exuding a persistent sense of suspense. Morrissey’s vocal only heightens the effect. Between the sung lines, his elongated, wordless vocalizations are given a pronounced echo, lending them a distant, otherworldly quality. The treatment gives the recording something of the disorienting atmosphere associated with the more experimental reaches of late-1960s rock: familiar musical elements are rendered subtly strange, creating a mood that borders on the surreal without ever quite surrendering to full-blown psychedelia.

This sense of unease intensifies as the song progresses. Morrissey sings of the death of the titular disco dancer with pronounced resignation and detachment, while the music beneath him grows steadily less settled. The track reaches its apogee roughly two-thirds of the way through, when Morrissey stops singing and the listener is treated to his improvisational piano playing against Marr’s increasingly abrasive guitar, Rourke’s insistent bass and Joyce’s thunderous, ever more forceful drumming. Into this extended instrumental passage Marr introduces what Simon Goddard describes as a “crooked background string drone,” produced on an Emulator. Marr later likened the effect to “Goldfinger on bad acid,” a characterization that neatly captures the track’s combination of cinematic grandeur and derangement.2 What began within the recognizable conventions of a rock song gradually seems to lose its bearings, the individual instruments accumulating into a dense, almost kaleidoscopic mass of sound.

For all its sense of instrumental disorder, Morrissey’s piano was not, according to Smiths biographer Tony Fletcher, part of the primary band performance. Fletcher relates that Morrissey subsequently returned to the studio and added the part as an overdub.3 Morrissey recalled the episode in Autobiography:

“The vocal room [of Wool Hall Studios] houses an old Red Lion piano that I decided to bang during a run-through of ‘Death Of A Disco Dancer’. More Lieutenant Pigeon4 than pianoforte, the Donnybrook5 punch-up pianner nonetheless remains in the track, and for the first (and last) time I am loosely listed as a musician.”6

The fact that the piano was overdubbed does little to diminish its sense of barely contained disorder. Morrissey’s own description of it as a “Donnybrook punch-up” neatly captures the effect: an unruly contribution to the turbulence of the recording.

That the recording feels as though it might at any moment come apart at the seams may owe something to the circumstances in which the underlying band performance was captured. Recalling the session a little over a year later, Morrissey described the group approaching the song with remarkably little ceremony and apparently little expectation that what they were playing would necessarily become the finished article:

“It was the first time the group played it together and we just switched the tape on and didn’t take it terribly seriously.”7

That spontaneity may help account for the character of the finished recording: its mounting disorder never sounds entirely controlled, which is precisely what gives the song so much of its unsettling power.

Listen to “Death of a Disco Dancer” at the link below:

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From Small Beginnings Come Great Things

The story of “William, It Was Really Nothing” begins in the back of the Smiths’ tour van, somewhere on the road to an unknown gig in 1984. Morrissey may have warned that “the devil will find work for idle hands to do,” but Johnny Marr seems to have put his idle moments to rather better use:

“One day, I was playing my Gibson acoustic on the mattress in the back of the van, on our way up to a gig, when a riff appeared, inspired by the speed and momentum of the journey. I played it over the next few days and it developed into a song that I thought would be good for the next single.”1

The precise date of this van journey has been lost to history, but the riff it produced soon led to an extraordinary burst of creativity. Following the success of “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” released on 21 May 1984 and reaching number 10 on the UK Singles Chart, Marr turned his attention to the Smiths’ next single. Over the course of a single weekend, he completed “William, It Was Really Nothing” and composed its two eventual B-sides, “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” and “How Soon Is Now?” A riff first played on an acoustic guitar in the back of a moving van would thus become the starting point for one of the most remarkable weekends of songwriting in the Smiths’ history. Recalling the writing of the three songs in a 2014 interview with Spin, Marr explained:

“It was written over a three-day period. On the Friday, I sat down around noonish with my little Portastudio2 and wrote ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’ and recorded it on a little four-track for the A-side of the next single. Because that was such a fast, short, upbeat song, I wanted the B-side to be different, so I wrote ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’ on Saturday in a different time signature — in a waltz time as a contrast. I was kind of happied [sic] out after writing ‘William.’ On Sunday night I kicked back and treated myself to writing something completely different from both those songs. I had a short, upbeat one and a short, sad one, so I decided to write a long, swampy one with a groove [“How Soon Is Now?”]. I always wrote songs in batches of three and usually still do.”3

The Problem with June

There is, however, a chronological difficulty in the generally accepted dating of this prolific weekend. Tony Fletcher places Marr’s Portastudio recordings at “the start of June,” Stéphane gives only “June 1984,” while Simon Goddard dates the writing of the songs to “early June.”456 Yet “William, It Was Really Nothing” was already sufficiently complete to receive its first public performance at the Provinssi Rock Festival in Seinäjoki, Finland, on Sunday, 3 June 1984.7 Marr’s own account is quite specific: “William, It Was Really Nothing” was written on a Friday, followed by “Please Please Please” on Saturday and “How Soon Is Now?” on Sunday. Consequently, the weekend in question cannot have fallen in June 1984. The first Friday of that month was 1 June, which would place the completion of Marr’s three-song sequence on Sunday, 3 June, the very day the Smiths were already performing “William, It Was Really Nothing” on stage in Finland, some 1,150 miles from Earls Court in London.

The discrepancy appears to have gone unnoticed, perhaps because the various accounts have been repeated independently without being tested against the band’s live chronology. None of this diminishes the considerable scholarship of Fletcher, Goddard, Stéphane or other Smiths chroniclers; it simply means that the surviving evidence does not support an early-June composition date. The song’s documented live debut provides a crucial chronological anchor and requires the conventional account to be reconsidered.

The precise date on which Marr wrote “William, It Was Really Nothing” remains unknown. What can be established, however, is that it was not in June 1984. Marr’s own account, when placed against the calendar and the song’s documented live debut on Sunday, 3 June, makes the conventional dating impossible. The latest weekend on which Marr could have begun the three-song sequence he describes was therefore 25–27 May 1984, although it may have occurred earlier. Morrissey’s lyric necessarily followed Marr’s composition of the music, and by 3 June the finished song had already entered the Smiths’ live repertoire.

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From Soundcheck to “Panic”

While “Panic” began to take shape around April 1986, its musical roots appear to reach somewhat further back: elements of the song can reportedly be heard in an instrumental the band rehearsed during a soundcheck the previous February. The seeds of Morrissey’s lyric may have been planted around the same time, during a conversation between him and Johnny Marr.

By May 1986, these scattered musical and lyrical ideas had coalesced into “Panic.” The Smiths recorded the song at Livingston Studios in London with producer John Porter and the band’s recently recruited “fifth Smith,” Craig Gannon. The same sessions also produced “The Draize Train” and an early, markedly slower version of “Sweet and Tender Hooligan,” making this a particularly fertile spell in the studio.12

Panic Hits the Streets

The Smiths’ 14th single, “Panic,” was released on 21 July 1986, backed by “Vicar in a Tutu,” with the 12-inch edition also featuring the instrumental “The Draize Train.” The single reached number 11 on the UK Singles Chart.

“Panic” was subsequently included on a number of Smiths compilations and later releases, beginning with The World Won’t Listen on 23 February 1987 and Louder Than Bombs on 30 March 1987. It also appeared on the German CD mini-album edition of the “Sheila Take a Bow” single in October 1987, the live album Rank on 5 September 1988, Best...I on 17 August 1992, The Complete Picture video compilation on 8 December 1992, Singles on 20 February 1995, The Very Best of The Smiths on 4 June 2001, The Sound of The Smiths on 10 November 2008, and Complete on 26 September 2011.

Sleeve, Grooves and Stickers

The single’s cover featured a close-up profile photograph of American actor Richard Bradford,3 who starred in the short-lived British television series Man in a Suitcase, a private-detective thriller originally broadcast in the UK from September 1967 to April 1968. “Panic” is one of only two singles released by the band whose front cover bears only the word “Smiths”; the other is “Bigmouth Strikes Again.”

The runout groove of the UK single is etched with “I DREAMT ABOUT STEW LAST NIGHT,”4 an apparent pun on the “Reel Around the Fountain” lyric “I dreamt about you last night.” The German 12-inch pressing carried a different and considerably more cryptic runout inscription: “HANG THEM HIGH MONIKA.” According to Discogs, the phrase was stamped, rather than hand-etched, into the runouts on both sides of the single alongside the matrix information. Its meaning remains uncertain. “Hang them high” plainly echoes the song’s “hang the DJ” refrain, but the identity of “Monika,” and whether the inscription originated with Morrissey, the German record label, or someone involved in the manufacturing process, has not been established.

Some early copies of the UK single included a free sheet of stickers bearing the words “Panic,” “Hang the DJ,” and “Smiths”; the 12-inch edition came with rectangular stickers, with three of each design, while the 7-inch edition featured round stickers, with two of each.

From London to Humberside

“Panic” initially reads rather like a breathless recitation of destinations from a well-worn Michelin guide to the British Isles. Beginning in London, Morrissey rattles through Birmingham and Leeds, ventures north to Grasmere in the Lake District and up to Carlisle, crosses the Irish Sea to Dublin, darts back east to Dundee on Scotland’s Firth of Tay, takes in Humberside, and eventually finds himself once more prowling the side-streets of Leeds and jogging around unnamed provincial towns. One must practically keep one’s head on a swivel to follow this staccato burst of geography. Yet this is hardly a sightseeing holiday. Wherever the song travels, the same anxiety has arrived first. London, Birmingham, Carlisle, Dublin, Dundee, Humberside and Leeds are united not by geography but by a spreading sense that ordinary life has somehow become intolerable: “Could life ever be sane again?” Even the pastoral refuge of Grasmere offers no sanctuary. Hopes may rise there, but, as Morrissey rather unhelpfully informs his “honey pie,” neither is she safe.

And then, having surveyed what begins to resemble a nation seized by collective anxiety, Morrissey identifies his culprit. The song suddenly turns its attention upon the disco and, more particularly, the unfortunate DJ whose endlessly repeated music “says nothing to me about my life.” The solution proposed is characteristically lacking in moderation: burn down the disco and hang the blessed DJ. Beneath the comic extravagance, however, lies the song’s more serious complaint. “Panic” depicts a country in which alienation seems ubiquitous, while the popular culture being broadcast to its inhabitants is incapable of saying anything meaningful about their experience. The geography matters because Morrissey makes the estrangement feel national rather than merely personal. From the streets of London to the side-streets of Leeds, there appears to be nowhere left to hide, not even, regrettably, beside a picturesque lake in Cumbria.

No Promised Land

“Panic” can also be read as the culmination of an informal triptych with “London” and “Half a Person,” three songs that progressively dismantle the notion that a change of place might somehow provide personal redemption.

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“What does your conscience say? - ‘You shall become the person you are.’” - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science1

“It took me a long, long time, but now I am born.”
- Morrissey, “At Last I Am Born”

Perceiving the Chains

An unexpected affinity emerges between certain lyrics by Morrissey, both with the Smiths and as a solo artist, and the writings of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Its interest lies not in any presumed direct influence, but in the questions their works raise about suffering, belonging, and the struggle to become oneself. Morrissey’s characteristic outsider - wounded, proud, and suspended between longing and contempt - inhabits an emotional world that Nietzsche’s philosophy can help illuminate.

The points of contact include nihilism, inherited morality and Christian guilt, social conformity, and the capacity of art to make suffering bearable. Beneath these themes lies a recurring question: how much of what we call our own lives is governed by judgments and values we have inherited? Nietzsche subjects those values to scrutiny, asking where they originate, whose interests they serve, and whether they strengthen or diminish life. Morrissey’s songs often dramatize the personal cost of living beneath them: shame, exclusion, thwarted desire, and the feeling that one’s existence requires an approval that never comes.

The affinity becomes particularly suggestive where recognition fails to bring release. For Nietzsche, the weakening of religious belief does not necessarily free the individual from the moral assumptions that belief sustained. Similarly, Morrissey’s narrators may reject the authority of the family, the Church, or the crowd while remaining painfully susceptible to their judgments. Contempt can coexist with a longing for acceptance; rebellion can leave guilt intact. To recognize an imposed value as oppressive is not yet to escape its influence.

Their responses to this predicament, however, often diverge. Nietzsche’s ideal of self-overcoming demands more than resistance: it calls for the creation of values and an affirmation of life that does not depend upon the world becoming just or suffering disappearing. Morrissey’s narrators more often remain within the struggle, their defiance interrupted by doubt, their wit unable to extinguish their longing. This is a difference of emphasis, not an absolute division, but it gives the comparison its force. Read alongside Nietzsche, their irresolution reveals the distance between perceiving one’s chains and breaking them.

For the sake of brevity, this essay considers only those instances in which the affinity between Morrissey and Nietzsche is most apparent. Although the foregoing may suggest a settled conclusion, my purpose is exploratory: to consider whether the resonances between a working-class Manchester lyricist and a nineteenth-century German philosopher amount to more than passing similarities. The argument rests on interpretation, not on any claim of direct influence, and its strength must be judged by the works themselves. There is, admittedly, a chasm between a suggestive comparison and a persuasive argument. To bridge it requires evidence capable of bearing the weight of skepticism.

“Accept Yourself”

Nietzschean Connection: Becoming who one is and escaping externally imposed valuation (The Joyful Wisdom (“La Gaya Scienza”), aphorisms 270 and 290; Thus Spake Zarathustra, “The Way of the Creating One”).

“When will you accept yourself?” is both the song’s recurring question and its central challenge. The song’s narrator measures himself against others, feels deficient, and struggles to establish a tolerable identity outside social judgment. Its repeated question, “When will you accept yourself?”, closely approaches Nietzsche’s injunction in aphorism 270 of The Joyful Wisdom (“La Gaya Scienza”): “You should become who you are.”2

The limitation is important: Nietzsche advocates transformation and self-overcoming, not merely accepting one’s present condition.3 Nevertheless, both texts identify dependence upon other people’s standards as an obstacle to authentic individuality.4

“How Soon Is Now?”

Nietzschean Connection: The conflict between self-valuation and the need for external recognition (Beyond Good and Evil, aphorisms 199 and 202; Thus Spake Zarathustra, “The Way of the Creating One”).

“How can you say / I go about things the wrong way?” is an unmistakable expression of resistance to external judgment. Morrissey’s narrator challenges another person’s authority to determine how he ought to live, insisting upon the legitimacy of his own needs: “I am human and I need to be loved / Just like everybody else does.” In this respect, the song approaches Nietzsche’s critique of herd morality, whereby conformity becomes a standard against which the individual is measured and difference is treated with suspicion.5

Yet the declaration contains a revealing tension. Having rejected the authority of others to judge him, the narrator still longs for something only others can offer: love. The club (“There’s a club, if you’d like to go”) promises recognition and connection (“You could meet somebody who really loves you”), but the evening becomes a succession of solitary moments: “So you go, and you stand on your own / And you leave on your own / And you go home, and you cry and you want to die.” He can reject the judgments that diminish him without escaping the pain of exclusion. His defiance does not extinguish his longing to be accepted.6

This tension brings the song into focus alongside Nietzsche’s account of self-valuation. In “The Way of the Creating One,” freedom requires more than rejecting inherited authority: the individual must become capable of creating values and living by them despite solitude, hostility, and self-doubt.7 Morrissey’s narrator voices the refusal, but the song leaves the work of self-creation unresolved. He can tell the judging voice to “shut your mouth,” yet he remains vulnerable to the rejection surrounding him. His need for love is not itself a failure of independence; rather, the song leaves open whether he can sustain a sense of his own worth when love is withheld. Read in this light, “How Soon Is Now?” dramatizes the distance between rejecting external authority and becoming one’s own authority. The narrator perceives the chain, resists it, yet remains bound by it.

“Nowhere Fast”

Nietzschean Connection: Nihilism and the spiritually exhausted modern world (The Joyful Wisdom (“La Gaya Scienza”), aphorisms 125 and 343; Thus Spake Zarathustra, Prologue, section 5, “The Last Man”).

“I think about life / And I think about death / And neither one particularly appeals to me” is among Morrissey’s starkest expressions of nihilism. This is more than ordinary unhappiness: both continued existence and its termination have lost their value, leaving the narrator suspended between two equally unappealing possibilities. That condition closely resembles Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism, in which traditional values have collapsed but no new source of meaning has arisen to replace them.8

The song’s references to technological novelty and household consumption also evoke Nietzsche’s “last man”: a spiritually diminished modern person surrounded by material conveniences but lacking any higher purpose.9 Even the prospect of experiencing a “natural emotion” comes as an almost unimaginable shock, suggesting how thoroughly the narrator has become estranged from authentic feeling. He recognizes the emptiness of this world but cannot overcome it. He represents the nihilistic predicament Nietzsche diagnoses, not Nietzsche’s proposed response to it.10

“Rubber Ring”

Nietzschean Connection: Art as a means of sustaining and affirming life (The Birth of Tragedy, sections 5 and 24).

“Don’t forget the songs that made you cry / And the songs that saved your life” states the song’s central proposition: music can preserve the listener emotionally by giving suffering a form through which it becomes bearable. “Rubber Ring” addresses those who once depended upon particular songs but may later dismiss them as adolescent embarrassments, forgetting that they “were the only ones who ever stood by you.”

This parallels the early Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, particularly his assertion that existence is justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.11 For both Nietzsche and Morrissey, art is not ornamental entertainment placed on top of life; it is one of the means by which life’s pain can be endured and transformed.12

The difference is that “Rubber Ring” is concerned with memory, gratitude, and loyalty to the music, and perhaps to the artist, whose emotional importance may fade as the listener grows older, whereas Nietzsche develops a much broader theory of aesthetic affirmation. Even so, this is among the most intellectually revealing parallels between the Smiths and Nietzsche: both treat art not as an escape from existence but as something that can make existence survivable (as many Smiths and Morrissey fans will readily attest to).13

“At Last I Am Born”

Nietzschean Connection: Self-overcoming and “becoming who one is” (The Joyful Wisdom (“La Gaya Scienza”), aphorisms 270 and 290; Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Self-Surpassing”).

“It took me a long, long time, but now I am born” describes a belated psychological birth. The narrator has stopped pursuing withheld affection, relinquished his despair and guilt, and emerged into what he calls “the one, true, free life.” This is strikingly close to Nietzsche’s injunction in aphorism 270 of The Joyful Wisdom (“La Gaya Scienza”): “You shall become the person you are.”14

The crucial correspondence is that identity is achieved rather than merely discovered.15 The song’s “birth” follows the overcoming of an older self dependent upon affection, external recognition, and inherited guilt concerning “the flesh.”16 Morrissey presents this transformation as a moment of arrival, whereas Nietzsche generally understands becoming oneself as an ongoing process of self-creation and self-overcoming.17 Nevertheless, both suggest that one becomes free only by ceasing to derive one’s identity and value from forces outside oneself.

“I Have Forgiven Jesus”

Nietzschean Connection: Christianity’s transformation of natural desire into guilt and suffering (The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, Second Essay, sections 16 and 21–22, and Third Essay; The Antichrist).

“Why did you give me / So much desire? / When there is nowhere I can go / To offload this desire” expresses the song’s central theological grievance. The narrator has behaved as the exemplary Christian child, yet finds himself burdened with love and desire for which neither his religious inheritance nor the surrounding “loveless world” provides an acceptable outlet. He consequently reverses the Christian economy of forgiveness: rather than asking Christ to forgive his desires, he forgives Christ for placing those desires within him.

This closely parallels Nietzsche’s contention in The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic and The Antichrist that Christianity turns natural instincts against the individual, making embodied desire a source of guilt and suffering.18 Morrissey’s description of being enclosed within “self-deprecating bones and skin” captures the internalization Nietzsche associates with the bad conscience: instinct denied outward expression is redirected against the self.19 The song and Nietzsche thus locate the sickness not in desire itself but in the conditions, and particularly the inherited moral system, that cause the individual to experience desire as accusation and affliction.

“Alma Matters”

Nietzschean Connection: Self-legislation and the creation of one’s own values (Beyond Good and Evil, aphorisms 260 and 261; The Joyful Wisdom (“La Gaya Scienza”), aphorism 290; Thus Spake Zarathustra, “The Way of the Creating One”).

“So, the life I have made / May seem wrong to you / But I’ve never been surer / It’s my life to ruin my own way” is the song’s central declaration of personal sovereignty. The narrator refuses other people’s authority to decide whether his choices or his life are proper. Even the possibility of ruining that life is claimed as his own prerogative. Reinforced by the dismissive question “But who asked you anyway?”, this is not simply an appeal to “be yourself”; it is an assertion of authority over the meaning and direction of one’s existence.20 21

That closely parallels Nietzsche’s higher individual, who ceases to derive his values from conventional morality and assumes responsibility for evaluating and shaping his own life.22 The words “wreck” (“It's my life to wreck my own way”) and “ruin” (“It's my life to ruin my own way”), however, introduce an important distinction. Nietzschean self-creation is generally directed toward self-overcoming and the enhancement of life, whereas Morrissey defiantly claims even the right to make a failure of his life, provided that the failure is his own.23

The lyric’s inclusion of “mind, body and soul” further resists the Christian-Platonic separation that elevates the soul while treating the body as morally suspect, a distinction Nietzsche likewise emphatically rejects.24 The whole person matters, not because society approves of the life he has made, but because it belongs to him.

“Sing Your Life”

Nietzschean Connection: Making one’s life into a consciously authored work (The Joyful Wisdom (“La Gaya Scienza”), aphorisms 290 and 299).

“Others sang your life / But now’s your chance to shine” establishes the song’s central imperative: the listener must reclaim authorship of an existence previously defined by other voices. To have “the pleasure of / Saying what you mean” and of “meaning what you sing” is to bring one’s outward expression into alignment with one’s own convictions rather than merely repeat the values and judgments of others. The instruction to “name all the things you love / All the things that you loathe” makes this an act of evaluation as well as self-expression.

This corresponds closely to two passages in The Joyful Wisdom (“La Gaya Scienza”): aphorism 290, in which Nietzsche describes “giving style” to one’s character,25 and aphorism 299, where he proposes that people should become “the poets of their lives.”26 Morrissey literalizes that philosophical metaphor: the listener must step forward, find a voice, and become both the author and performer of an existence that others have previously “sung.”

Death makes this act of self-creation urgent. “All of this will end / So sing it now” warns that the opportunity to define and express oneself is finite. A life left unsung remains trapped in “the wasteland of your head”; a life sung becomes a consciously fashioned work before its inevitable ending.

“The World Is Full of Crashing Bores”

Nietzschean Connection: Herd culture, counterfeit distinction, and the “last man” (Beyond Good and Evil, aphorisms 199 and 202; Thus Spake Zarathustra, Prologue, section 5, and “The Flies in the Market-Place”).

“This world, I am afraid / Is designed for crashing bores” states the song’s central cultural diagnosis. It depicts a society in which conspicuously ordinary and culturally empty people become public authorities and celebrities. Mediocrity has not merely become common; it has become triumphant, self-congratulatory, and institutionally protected. The description of pop stars as “so scared to show intelligence / It might smear their lovely career” suggests that the culture actively rewards conformity and makes genuine distinction a professional liability.27

This closely resembles Nietzsche’s “last man” in Thus Spake Zarathustra: the complacent, diminished modern person who avoids risk, depth, transformation, and greatness.28 It also parallels “The Flies in the Market-Place,” where noisy performers command public attention while genuine creators of values remain apart from the crowd.29

The narrator’s insistence that “I am not one” represents an attempt to reject the standards of this culture and assert his difference from it. Yet the earlier admission “And I must be one,” prompted by the fact that no one offers him love, reveals how susceptible he remains to the judgment of others. He alternately derives his value from the crowd and repudiates its authority to evaluate him.30

The parallel, therefore, is not simply that Morrissey and Nietzsche both dislike dull people. Both diagnose a culture whose institutions reward and reproduce mediocrity, while also recognizing the difficulty of maintaining genuine individuality within it.

The Chains That Made Us

Perhaps the most revealing affinity between Morrissey and Nietzsche lies in a shared concern with the forces that shape the individual, and the difficulty of living beyond their authority. Christianity and its surviving moral judgments form part of this inheritance, alongside social convention, the demands of belonging, and the values through which we learn to judge ourselves. Yet rejecting inherited values does not, by itself, resolve the individual’s struggle. When those values lose their authority, they may leave a void: the suspicion that nothing has meaning or worth. The question becomes not merely how to escape what diminishes us, but how to find something worth living for.

Here the parallels explored in this essay converge: resistance to imposed values, estrangement from the crowd, the threat of nihilism, the struggle to become one’s own authority, and the capacity of art to make suffering bearable. Morrissey’s narrators, however, complicate Nietzsche’s ideal of self-overcoming. They rebel against inherited morality while remaining entangled in its language; reject the crowd’s judgment while remaining wounded by it; and approach self-creation only to falter in doubt, longing, or resignation. Their songs give suffering a form without necessarily resolving it.

Where Nietzsche challenges the individual to create values and affirm life, Morrissey’s songs leave a troubling question open: what if we understand what has made us, desperately wish to escape it, and discover that some part of it has become inseparable from who we are?

The Price of Becoming Oneself

The distinction between Morrissey and his narrators reveals a final possibility: Morrissey’s public self has attained a degree of independence that so often eludes the figures in his songs. Where they remain suspended between resistance and the longing for acceptance, Morrissey appears willing to maintain positions that place acceptance at risk. This need not mean that rejection leaves him untouched. The more revealing question is whether he permits it to determine who he must become. Independence, in this sense, consists not in immunity to disapproval, but in refusing to make approval the condition of one’s convictions.

Controversy alone, however, is no proof of self-overcoming, and sincerity does not place any conviction beyond criticism. Nietzsche’s creator must do more than oppose the crowd: he must give form and discipline to a life governed by values he can make his own. Whether Morrissey meets that demand remains a question rather than a settled conclusion. Yet the contrast is suggestive: the songwriter who gives such moving expression to the need for acceptance also presents, in his public life, an image of what it might cost to live without its assurance.

Perhaps this is the final irony. Morrissey’s narrators ask whether they will ever be loved. Morrissey himself raises a different question: how much of oneself should be surrendered to secure that love? If the public figure he has presented over more than four decades, admired and reviled alike, offers any indication, Morrissey seems unlikely to purchase acceptance at the expense of his convictions. Compromise appears doubtful; capitulation, more doubtful still.

Seen in this light, Morrissey may approach Nietzsche’s ideal of the individual who ceases to take the crowd’s judgments as his measure. Morrissey’s independence would lie not in being untouched by those judgments, but in refusing to grant them final authority over his life. To the extent that he gives his character a form and direction of his own, he suggests what it might mean to become who one is: neither seeking the herd’s permission nor allowing its condemnation to dictate the terms of one’s existence.

If this is so, Morrissey’s victory lies in retaining that authority for himself. Posterity need not endorse his every conviction to preserve his achievement. When the quarrels of the moment have faded, it may be the artist’s voice, rather than the din of his detractors, that remains.

The Smiths’ version of “What’s the World?” emerged almost as an afterthought. Released on 6 November 1987, in the immediate aftermath of the band’s breakup, the cover of a song originally recorded by James1 was tucked away on the UK cassette edition of “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish” and omitted from every other format.

Recorded by sound engineer Grant Showbiz2 at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom on 25 September 1985, the performance was already more than two years old by the time it finally appeared. It documents one of only seven times the Smiths played the song. All seven came during the Scottish leg of the Meat Is Murder tour, between 22 September and 1 October 1985; after that brief flourish, the song disappeared from their set, and Morrissey never returned to it during his solo career. The Barrowland recording surfaced once more on 23 May 1995, when it was reissued as a B-side to the Smiths’ “Sweet and Tender Hooligan” single.

Even the cassette’s artwork carried the familiar imprint of Morrissey’s cinematic preoccupations. Its inlay featured a cropped still of actress Avril Angers3 from the 1966 film The Family Way.45 The film would furnish another Smiths sleeve as well: a still of English actor Murray Head6 appeared on “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before.”

Listen to the Smiths’ cover of ‘What’s the World?’ below::

The song had first appeared on Jimone, the 1983 debut EP by fellow Mancunian band James. Formed in Manchester in 1982, the same year as the Smiths, James became closely entwined with their early history and supported them on the UK leg of the Meat Is Murder tour between February and April 1985.

The lyric is a savage critique of the music industry’s manufacture and commodification of identity. The aspiring artist seeks an authentic voice, yet is dissected, packaged, and reconstructed from secondhand poses into a “Frankenstar,” held together by “management glue.” The song’s processed-food imagery reduces the individual to a marketable product, while the disintegrating repetition of “I” suggests that, beneath the manufactured persona, the self is being stripped away.

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Taking Shape in the Rain

Johnny Marr recalled that “Well I Wonder” emerged after he returned to Manchester in the late summer of 1984, while beginning work on material for Meat Is Murder:

“I remember the start of the record because I moved back to Manchester very deliberately - to get the atmosphere right for the instrumental tracks I was writing. And that worked out immediately because ‘Well I Wonder’ came out of that, with the rain and everything. When we did it, we knew it would be popular because it had that real sense of yearning in it.”2

Although Marr’s recollection associates the emergence of “Well I Wonder” with his return to Manchester, elements of the song appear to have originated considerably earlier. They can reportedly be heard on a home demo Marr recorded in late 1983 that was later found in the possession of Mike Joyce.3 Marr revisited the piece as an instrumental during the July 1984 sessions with John Porter at Jam Studios in London, alongside “William, It Was Really Nothing,” “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want” and “How Soon Is Now?,” as well as early versions of “Nowhere Fast,” “Rusholme Ruffians” and “This Night Has Opened My Eyes.” Marr’s recollection therefore appears to describe the song taking its final form after his return to Manchester, rather than its initial conception.

The album version of “Well I Wonder” was primarily recorded during a mild, rainy October 1984 at Amazon Studios in Liverpool. Although the Smiths received production credit for the song, as they did for the album’s other tracks, the responsibility fell largely to Marr, with Stephen Street serving as recording engineer. Overdubs were added the following month at Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey, and the final mix was completed that December at Island Records’ Fallout Shelter in London.4

A Quiet Arrival

Issued approximately two weeks before Meat Is Murder, “Well I Wonder” appeared as the B-side of the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” single on 28 January 1985, although some sources give the release date as 1 February 1985. The album followed on 11 February, with “Well I Wonder” appearing as its eighth track. The song was subsequently issued as the B-side of the “Barbarism Begins at Home” single in Greece later that year. Long after the Smiths’ dissolution, it was included in The Smiths Singles Box in 2008 and on Complete in 2011.

Music Hung on Atmosphere

Atmospheric and understated, “Well I Wonder” is a ballad whose simplicity conceals an intricate interplay among the musicians. Marr’s delicately picked chord fragments, open voicings, and ringing notes create a suspended, dreamlike atmosphere, while Rourke’s unusually prominent and melodic bass supplies much of the song’s movement and emotional tension. Rather than merely supporting Marr, the rhythm section allows his guitar to hover above it: Joyce’s restrained drumming provides a steady foundation, while Rourke quietly leads the harmonic journey. Together, they lull the listener toward a kind of euphoric somnolence, complemented by Morrissey’s soft, almost fragile delivery.

The spacious production preserves the intimacy of the vocal, the clarity of the bass, and the warmth of Marr’s lightly reverberant guitar, resisting the temptation to overwhelm the song with additional instrumentation. Marr later explained that “We hung a lot of music on the atmosphere… [‘Well I Wonder’] has a feeling of suspension in it and is very delicate. I could have put a lot of overdubs on that song, but I left it as is.”5 That restraint is essential to the recording’s effect: the arrangement does not build toward a conventional climax but instead smolders with a yearning that remains unresolved.

As Morrissey’s voice rises into a breathless falsetto, sampled rain gradually gathers beneath Marr’s delicate closing figure, transforming the ending into an atmospheric soundscape. The raindrops heard in the final few seconds of the track have been described as “an accidental homage to the showers featured on The Ronettes’ classic Phil Spector production ‘Walking in the Rain’,”6 ,’” although the idea for the effect itself came from Morrissey. As Marr told Simon Goddard in The Smiths: Songs That Saved Your Life, “That was Morrissey’s idea. He was always good at adding these little bits of atmosphere.”7 Here, the effect is more than decorative: the rain completes the song’s emotional landscape, allowing it not so much to conclude as to recede from hearing. That same sense of suspension permeates Morrissey’s lyrics, among his most concentrated expressions of unacknowledged love.

Listen to the song in the following link:

“Please Keep Me in Mind”

The lyric turns upon a painfully modest hope: that the speaker, who passes within sight of the beloved without knowing whether he is even noticed, might at least be remembered. “Please keep me in mind” is the song’s devastating center - not a plea to be loved or answered, but merely to be remembered. As hoarse crying gives way to gasping and dying, romantic longing becomes an existential “last stand,” with the speaker’s entire identity threatened by another person’s indifference. Stripped of gender, history, and explanation, the lyric captures a fear deeper than rejection: that of leaving no impression upon the person who has come to mean everything.

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The eighth and final track on Morrissey’s fifth studio album, Southpaw Grammar, “Southpaw” is an imposing ten minutes in length. Co-written with Alain Whyte and recorded during the album sessions at Hook End Manor in Oxfordshire in March and April 1995, the song was released with the album on 28 August 1995. Produced by Steve Lillywhite and featuring Boz Boorer and Whyte on guitars, Jonny Bridgwood on bass, and Spencer Cobrin on drums, “Southpaw” represented a tantalizing musical departure from much of Morrissey’s work up to that point. Its extraordinary length may test the patience of some listeners, but it is also essential to what the recording ultimately achieves.

From its opening moments, an ominous undercurrent establishes itself and gradually expands as the song progresses. Electric and acoustic guitars, together with Cobrin’s remarkable drumming, propel the music inexorably forward. Rather than moving toward a conventional bridge or climactic crescendo, however, the song flows almost imperceptibly into its extraordinary second half: an extended coda that seems determined never to end. Cobrin increasingly adopts a martial quality in his playing, while Boorer and Whyte’s guitars rise and recede in cascading waves, creating a dense, reverberant tapestry of sound. Delicate counter-melodies and subtle changes of tempo seem to materialize from nowhere, disappear beneath the surface, and then unexpectedly re-emerge. What initially appears repetitive gradually becomes almost hypnotic.

Against this sprawling musical backdrop, Morrissey delivers remarkably succinct and evocative lyrics concerning a “sick boy” who finds himself abandoned by his friends and retreats to the supposed safety of home - a decision that appears to determine the course of his life. Curiously, the lyrical focus changes completely during the song’s extended second half. Morrissey begins intoning that “there is something that you should know,” before repeatedly announcing that “the girl of your dreams” is “sad and all alone.” The song finally expires with a piteous, increasingly exposed plea: “Help me, help me, help...”

More than a song intended merely to entertain, “Southpaw” can fairly be described as an experience - one constructed through an audacious musical framework and Lillywhite’s atmospheric production. It wanders somewhere between art and madness and, for ten strange minutes, seems perfectly content to inhabit both. Threaded through it all are Morrissey’s forlorn lyrics, which become increasingly intriguing upon closer examination.

Indeed, a careful reading of “Southpaw” reveals references and possible allegories suggesting that something more personal may lie beneath the surface. To understand why a Marr-centered interpretation is worth considering, however, it is necessary to briefly look back to “Billy Budd,” released the previous year on Vauxhall and I. That song contains several apparent references to Johnny Marr and can plausibly be read not merely as being about him, but as a message directed to Morrissey’s erstwhile friend and musical partner. “Billy Budd” therefore provides an important precedent for the reading proposed here: if Morrissey had already used one song to address Marr obliquely, then “Southpaw” may represent a continuation of that private dialogue. This time, however, the tone appears darker and more despondent, with Morrissey contemplating the wreckage of their partnership and perhaps expressing a wish that it might somehow be repaired.

It is hardly unreasonable to assume that Morrissey’s choice of words in “Southpaw” - or, for that matter, in any of his lyrics - was conscious and deliberate. That becomes important when the song speaks of a “boy” who “ran with his pals in the sun,” only to turn around and discover that “they were gone.”

Marr was only eighteen when he first approached Morrissey at his home in May 1982. Although legally an adult in Britain, he was still a remarkably young man, particularly alongside the twenty-three-year-old Morrissey. Referring to him colloquially as a “boy” would therefore hardly have been incongruous. Within a matter of months, Morrissey and Marr had begun assembling the Smiths around their new partnership, and the musicians who joined them became, both figuratively and literally, Marr’s “pals.”

The image of the boy who “ran [...] in the sun” can likewise be read allegorically as the extraordinary success and fame Marr enjoyed with the Smiths - his proverbial time in the sun. But the boy suddenly finds himself alone: “You turned around and they were gone.” Rather than seeking out his companions, the boy, now described as “sick,” apparently accepts his reversal of fortune: “So easily defeated.”

There is an intriguing parallel here with the circumstances surrounding Marr’s departure from the Smiths. Marr later attributed his decision to a combination of exhaustion, dissatisfaction with the band’s musical direction, incessant recording and touring, and the additional burden of functioning as its de facto business manager. Yet his departure was also accompanied by a peculiar breakdown in communication. An NME report published on 1 August 1987 portrayed relations between Morrissey and Marr as having deteriorated dramatically, even claiming that the two had not spoken for three and a half months and, rather intriguingly in the context of “Southpaw,” that Marr had told friends that he and Morrissey were “no longer pals.”1 Whatever the accuracy of the report’s more sensational claims, Marr’s subsequent departure became permanent. The partnership that had begun with an eighteen-year-old appearing unexpectedly on Morrissey’s doorstep ended amid distance, exhaustion, misunderstanding, and silence.

The potential linchpin of this interpretation is the curious line “and you ran back to Ma.” Spoken aloud, “Ma” bears an unmistakable resemblance to Marr. It is difficult, at least within this reading, not to wonder whether Morrissey selected that particular word precisely for its phonetic suggestion. “You ran back to Ma” could therefore carry a second meaning: Johnny retreats from the Smiths and returns to being simply Johnny Marr, now irrevocably separated from his “pals” and the identity the four men had shared. Morrissey then delivers what sounds almost like a judgment upon that decision: it “set the pace for the rest of your days.” In one obvious sense, it did. Whatever Marr accomplished afterward, leaving the Smiths permanently altered the trajectory of his life.

The song’s second half introduces an even stranger possibility. Morrissey had long demonstrated a willingness to blur gender within his lyrics, and if the “boy” of “Southpaw” is provisionally identified as Marr, who then is “the girl of your dreams” who remains “sad and all alone”? Within this interpretation, the answer may be Morrissey himself.

The suggestion becomes particularly intriguing when “Southpaw” is placed beside “Billy Budd.” That earlier song concludes with the appeal “Don’t leave us in the dark,” as though Morrissey were leaving the proverbial door slightly ajar. “Southpaw” seems to open it wider. “There is something that you should know,” Morrissey repeatedly insists: “the girl of your dreams / is sad and all alone.” What begins as an observation eventually dissolves into something more naked and vulnerable. By the song’s final moments, metaphor and ambiguity have largely fallen away, leaving only a plea addressed to someone who is no longer there:

Help me.
Help me.
Help...

There is one final detail worth considering: “Southpaw” is not only the title track of Southpaw Grammar, but its closing song. We cannot know whether the song’s emotional significance determined its position in the running order, but its placement nevertheless gives it unusual weight. After everything that precedes it, Morrissey chooses to conclude the album with this sprawling, ten-minute meditation on abandonment, loneliness, and loss, allowing its final desperate plea to become the last human voice heard on the record. If “Southpaw” is indeed a veiled address to Marr, its position becomes all the more striking: Morrissey has reserved the album’s final word for him. “Southpaw” does not merely end the record; it leaves its unresolved message hanging in the silence that follows.

Is “Southpaw” really Morrissey addressing Johnny Marr? There is no definitive evidence that it is, and the interpretation necessarily remains speculative. Yet the peculiar convergence of the “boy,” his vanished “pals,” his time “in the sun,” the conspicuous “Ma/Marr” wordplay, the lonely “girl,” and that final desperate appeal makes the possibility difficult to dismiss altogether.

If “Southpaw” is indeed addressed to Marr, the more haunting question is not whether Morrissey wanted him back, but in what capacity. Was he yearning for the return of the guitarist and songwriting partner with whom he had created the defining music of his life, or for the friend whose arrival on his doorstep had altered its course just as profoundly? Perhaps, by 1995, even Morrissey could no longer separate the two. The Smiths had been both a creative partnership and an intensely personal bond, and the loss of one necessarily carried the loss of the other. In that light, the final “Help me” sounds less like a summons to reform a band than the confession of a man pining for someone whose absence, eight years later, still left a conspicuous void in his life. Perhaps that is what lies at the heart of “Southpaw”: not simply that Morrissey missed Johnny Marr, but that, in a profoundly personal and entirely platonic sense, he loved him - and had never quite stopped.

- William Shakespeare, As You Like It

How the Fifth Smith Came to Be

Before joining the Smiths, Andy Rourke began experimenting with heroin as a teenager growing up on a council estate. The habit followed him into the Smiths and, as the band’s success brought him increasing amounts of money, his heroin use spiraled into a full-blown addiction. As he later recalled, “You’re a young kid, and then overnight you’re in a successful band. You start getting a bunch of money and don’t know what to do. You start spending it on drugs.”1 By early 1986, that addiction had begun to exact more serious consequences. Rourke was arrested for possession of heroin, and was subsequently sacked from the group.2 The dismissal was largely, though certainly not wholly, motivated by the expectation that he would be unable to obtain the necessary work visas for the North American leg of The Queen Is Dead tour, scheduled to begin that summer.

While it is generally reported that Johnny Marr invited guitarist Craig Gannon3 to replace Rourke on bass, in fact it was Guy Pratt4 who was brought in to fill Andy’s shoes. Although Pratt’s brief involvement is somewhat tangential to an essay focused on Craig Gannon, it is nevertheless worth noting. Pratt reportedly assumed that his replacing Rourke was effectively a fait accompli. Given his impressive résumé, he apparently saw little reason to doubt that he could more than adequately match the contributions of the recently dismissed bassist. As Pratt later wrote of being asked to replace Rourke, “Let’s face it, how many people would be bothered?”5

According to author Tony Fletcher, Pratt spent nearly two weeks with both the band and Rourke, learning the bass lines and participating in rehearsals. He quickly realized, however, that filling Andy’s shoes would be a formidable task, perhaps one he could not effectively accomplish. In fact, Pratt marveled at the “sophistication” of what he was expected to learn.

According to Pratt, his proverbial sigh of relief was “almost palpable” when it was announced that Rourke would be rejoining the Smiths.

As for Gannon’s role in the Smiths. Marr invited him to play rhythm guitar in order to complement him on lead guitar:6

“I never touched the bass at all and I was never asked to. The first time I met Johnny he sounded me out to see if I’d be interested in replacing Andy on bass so it’s true that was the first offer but that’s as far as that went. I’ve said it many times and some people still don’t seem to want to believe it but I was asked to join The Smiths as a guitar player and I joined as a guitar player. It wasn’t an afterthought of Johnny to stick me over on guitar as some people want to believe, it was planned and there were definite reasons for it. Since then I usually play bass on my own music and sometimes other peoples but I was and am a guitar player.”7 - Craig Gannon

As fate would have it, Rourke’s drug charge resulted only in a two-year suspended sentence and a £1,000 fine. More importantly for the Smiths, despite expectations to the contrary, his applications for work visas in both Canada and the United States were approved, clearing the way for him to participate in the North American leg of the forthcoming tour. Within a couple of weeks, Morrissey and Marr reinstated Rourke as an active member of the Smiths.

Gannon’s role in the Smiths remained exclusively that of a second guitarist. As he later explained, “Me being there freed Johnny up a lot to embroider his guitar parts.”8 Rourke’s return, therefore, did not threaten Gannon’s position in the group; it simply rendered Pratt’s services unnecessary. With the Smiths now functioning, unusually, as a five-piece, Gannon soon acquired the affectionate moniker “The Fifth Smith.”

The Fifth Smith

Gannon participated as the second guitarist throughout all three legs of The Queen Is Dead tour, which took the band through the UK, North America, and then back to the UK between July and October 1986.

In the recording studio throughout 1986, Gannon contributed to several Smiths tracks:

• The singles “Panic” (recorded in May 1986) and “Ask” (recorded in June 1986). Gannon also appears (briefly) in their respective promotional films.

• An early, slower version of “Sweet and Tender Hooligan”, recorded in May during the sessions for “Panic”. This version was never released by the Smiths and was superseded by the version recorded for John Peel’s BBC radio program in December 1986.

• The instrumental “The Draize Train”, also recorded in May, which appeared on the B-side of the 12-inch edition of the “Panic” single, the Greek 12-inch edition of “Bigmouth Strikes Again”, and the Germany-only “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” single.

• “Golden Lights”, recorded in June 1986 and released as a B-side on the 12-inch edition of the “Ask” single.

• “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby,” “Half a Person,” and “London,” all recorded in October 1986. These tracks subsequently appeared on The World Won’t Listen, as well as on Louder Than Bombs.

Last but certainly not least, Gannon also appears on the Smiths’ Rank live album, recorded at the National Ballroom in Kilburn, London, on 23 October 1986 during the final leg of The Queen Is Dead tour.

Exit, Stage Left

Depending on whom one asks, either the Smiths dropped Gannon from the lineup at the conclusion of The Queen Is Dead tour or Gannon left of his own accord. Ultimately, however, the distinction may be irrelevant, since Gannon was a hired touring and session musician rather than a formal member of the Smiths. Nevertheless, Morrissey saw fit to offer his own account of Gannon’s departure in Autobiography:

“Once the US tour has ended [the North American leg of The Queen Is Dead tour], Johnny suggests that we do not make contact with Craig, in order to test whether he would actually bother to contact any of us. Unsurprisingly, Craig does not contact anyone […] It is not announced that Craig has departed, largely because his name is never again mentioned, and the press make no comment on Craig’s disappearance. Like mist, he evaporates, and it is confusing to think that he had ever been present.”9

Back in Morrissey’s Orbit

Post-Smiths, Gannon reunited with Morrissey in late 1988 to record the singles “The Last of the Famous International Playboys” and “Interesting Drug,” released in February and April 1989, respectively. Rourke and Joyce participated in the sessions as well, and all three appeared in the promotional video for “The Last of the Famous International Playboys.” Gannon also played on the accompanying B-sides: “Michael’s Bones” and “Lucky Lisp” for the former, and “Such a Little Thing Makes Such a Big Difference” for the latter.

Additionally, Gannon played on “The Bed Took Fire,” originally intended as a B-side to the “Interesting Drug” single. Morrissey was dissatisfied with the recording, however, and the track was shelved. During the winter of 1989 and 1990, while working on material that would eventually appear on Bona Drag, Morrissey asked producer Stephen Street to help remix the song. The resulting version met with Morrissey’s approval and was released as a B-side to the “Piccadilly Palare” single in October 1990, under the alternate title “At Amber.”

The original version of “The Bed Took Fire” remained unreleased for twenty-one years before finally appearing, under its original title and in its original form, on the remastered 20th-anniversary edition of Bona Drag in October 2010.

Gannon also participated in Morrissey’s first concert as a solo artist, held at Wolverhampton Civic Hall in Wolverhampton, England, on 22 December 1988. Thereafter, however, his involvement with Morrissey came to an end. Gannon has offered little explanation for the parting, remarking only, “There are reasons too long to go into as to why I didn’t carry on.”10

A Fascinating Bungle

As of early 2013, Gannon reported that he had not had any contact with Morrissey for well over a decade:

“I’ve not had any contact with Morrissey for years. I think the last time I saw him was at his flat in Altrincham around 1989 when we met to talk about writing together. At that point I’d also written a song he’d written lyrics to which he wanted to release as his next single.”11

In Autobiography, Morrissey makes a couple of decidedly impolite remarks about Gannon, describing his hiring as “a fascinating bungle” and adding that “Nothing useful vibrates in Craig’s upper storey.” What prompted such unflattering observations is unclear, particularly given that Gannon’s contributions to the Smiths were generally well received. While some might simply attribute the remarks to Morrissey’s longstanding reputation for being “difficult,” it is perhaps more likely that they reflect his characteristically candid, unfiltered recollection of working with Gannon.

The former Fifth Smith responded to Morrissey’s jibes on social media on 31 October 2013, describing them on his Facebook page as “blatant bitter lies, all will become clear very soon...” The post was deleted the following day.

Craig Gannon Reloaded

In January 2018, it was announced that Craig Gannon, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce would collaborate under the name Classically Smiths, in effect a partial Smiths reunion. The project was promoted as an opportunity to hear some of the Smiths’ most memorable songs performed by the trio in collaboration with the Manchester Camerata Orchestra, with unnamed guest singers providing the vocals.

Concerts were tentatively scheduled for the summer of 2018 in Manchester, London and Edinburgh. Almost immediately after the announcement, however, the project collapsed when Rourke denied that he had agreed to take part.

Uncredited and Unpaid

Craig Gannon claimed to have originated the opening chord sequence of “Ask,” a seemingly minor matter that would later have significant repercussions for Morrissey and Marr:

“Me and Johnny were sat in the library playing acoustic guitars… I just started playing the chord sequence which would later become ‘Ask’ in exactly the way it appears on the record… The only section… I didn’t come up with was the middle eight… Up until the release of ‘Ask’ I still thought I’d be given a writing credit.”12

While Gannon may well have arrived at something similar, Johnny Marr had already used the very same chord sequence in an earlier demo. Marr himself disputed Gannon’s claim, and Gannon ultimately received no writing credit.

Gannon was still touring with the Smiths at the time of the release of the “Ask” single (20 October 1986), so one surmises that he would have inquired on the omission of a songwriting credit on the song. Whether or not Gannon did so is not known.

In 1989, the matter moved from grievance to litigation when Craig Gannon sued Morrissey and Marr over songwriting contributions made during his time with the Smiths, particularly in relation to “Ask,” as well as over unpaid wages. The dispute was eventually settled out of court for £44,000, approximately £142,000 today, comprising £30,000 in back pay and £14,000 in legal costs.

The Records Remember

For all the ambiguity surrounding his place in the band, one fact remains stubbornly audible: Craig Gannon may have been the Fifth Smith only briefly, but he was there, and the records remember him even when people do not.

Sexual Ambiguity by Design

Few aspects of Morrissey’s public life have generated more speculation than his sexuality. Throughout his career, the press variously portrayed him as celibate, a closeted homosexual, a frustrated heterosexual, or a bisexual who simply refused to come out. The fascination was understandable. At a time when pop music reveled in overt sexuality, Morrissey presented himself as its antithesis: emotionally expressive yet sexually elusive, at least to a point.

The cover of the Smiths’ 1983 debut single, “Hand in Glove,” left little to the imagination. Its photograph showed a nude male reclining against a wall, his buttocks fully exposed. To say that Morrissey’s choice of cover art was a bold opening move for a largely unknown band would be an understatement, particularly because the image could reasonably be construed as homoerotic. This provocative approach continued with the band’s eponymous debut album, which featured a cropped photograph of a shirtless Joe Dallesandro1, a prominent sex symbol within gay subculture during the 1960s and 1970s. Although best known for his appearances in underground films associated with Andy Warhol’s Factory, Dallesandro had begun his career posing for homoerotic photographs.

Fans with more than a passing knowledge of the band are aware that Morrissey and Johnny Marr consciously sought to avoid presenting the Smiths as just another rock group, although the suggestion that they specifically intended to position themselves as a “gay” band stems primarily from former bassist Dale Hibbert, who later claimed that the pair discussed doing so. What is clear, however, is that the Smiths’ aesthetic deliberately drew upon elements of queer subculture, camp, and homoeroticism, creating an ambiguity that stood in conspicuous opposition to the rigid heterosexual conventions of much early 1980s rock.

Nor did these influences exist only within Morrissey’s songs and sleeve designs. His cultural affinities repeatedly drew him toward writers, performers, filmmakers, and actors associated with homosexual or queer culture. Oscar Wilde was a longstanding idol, while the influence of gay playwright Joe Orton2 has frequently been detected in Morrissey’s wit, language, and fascination with sexual outsiders. Indeed, one profile memorably described the young Morrissey as “channelling the spirits of Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton.”3

Actor and comedian Kenneth Williams4 was another object of admiration. Following Williams’s death, Morrissey praised his “touch-me-not wit” and described his persona as “stylishly non-sexual,” an interesting choice of words given Morrissey’s own public image.5 The Smiths also worked with openly gay filmmaker Derek Jarman6, whose visual sensibility proved particularly well suited to the band. None of these affinities establishes anything about Morrissey’s own sexuality. They do, however, demonstrate how comfortably he moved within a cultural universe populated by gay artists, queer iconography, sexual outsiders, and men whose lives challenged conventional definitions of masculinity and sexuality.

Before the Smiths, Morrissey was already cultivating a decidedly ambiguous persona. In a 1981 letter to a pen pal, he wrote, “I have a girlfriend called Annalisa. We’re both bisexual. Real hip, huh? I hate sex.” The contradiction is striking. Even while casually describing himself as bisexual, Morrissey immediately qualified the declaration with the far more emphatic “I hate sex.” The following year he teamed up with Johnny Marr and formed the Smiths, whose songs were soon laced with the language and sensibilities of gay subculture. As journalist Liz Hoggard later observed, “Only 15 years after homosexuality had been decriminalised,”7 Morrissey’s lyrics “flirted with every kind of gay subculture.”8 Even the Encyclopædia Britannica would later characterize the persona he cultivated as one of compellingly conflicted celibacy tempered by coy suggestions of homosexuality.9

A qualification is necessary before proceeding. The examples cited here are intentionally selective. Morrissey’s catalogue, interviews, sleeve imagery, literary references, public statements, and visual iconography contain far more material relevant to questions of sexuality than could reasonably be examined in a single essay. What follows should therefore not be mistaken for a comprehensive inventory. Instead, I have chosen a limited number of particularly revealing examples that illustrate patterns recurring throughout his career. There are many more that might reasonably have been included. The purpose here is not to prove the thesis through sheer accumulation, but to consider whether a smaller body of representative evidence points toward an interpretation that has largely escaped notice.

The Square Peg Interview

In a remarkably candid 1984 interview with Square Peg, Morrissey offered perhaps his clearest contemporary explanation of the sexual ambiguity surrounding the Smiths. He confirmed that the band’s use of male imagery was entirely deliberate, conceived partly as an inversion of the stylized female imagery employed by groups such as Roxy Music, among many others. “I wanted to do exactly the same thing with male images,” he explained, adding that he wanted to accomplish this in a manner that would “compliment rather than slur.”

The same intention extended to his songwriting. Morrissey described “This Charming Man” as deliberately “sexually advanced” and, more explicitly still, as being “about male relationships.” Yet rather than present those relationships through the flamboyant sexual imagery associated with supposedly adventurous or sexually ambiguous pop stars of the period, Morrissey wanted them to appear natural, frank, and unremarkable. In much the same way, the progression from the nude male figure on “Hand in Glove” to the image derived from Andy Warhol’s film Flesh on the debut album placed imagery associated with gay and homoerotic culture directly into the commercial mainstream, something Morrissey admitted gave him a “smug sense of satisfaction” when he saw the Smiths’ album displayed alongside conventional pop releases.

Crucially, however, Morrissey resisted interpreting any of this through the conventional categories of homosexuality or heterosexuality. He argued that terms such as heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual imposed artificial distinctions upon something fundamentally human, even suggesting that their use encouraged the very sexual segregation and oppression they purported to describe. His position therefore contained a distinction that would remain central to discussions of his sexuality for decades: Morrissey could deliberately celebrate male beauty, write about intimacy and attraction between men, and draw freely upon gay cultural imagery without regarding any of those things as declarations of a fixed homosexual identity.

Indeed, he told Square Peg that he scarcely recognized gender boundaries when dealing with people at all. The apparent contradiction, therefore, was no contradiction to Morrissey. The Smiths’ work could be unmistakably homoerotic while its author simultaneously rejected the labels by which audiences sought to define both the work and the man who created it.10

The Refusal to Be Defined

During the Smiths’ career, Morrissey repeatedly professed to be celibate. Johnny Marr remarked in a 1984 interview that Morrissey “doesn’t participate in sex at the moment and hasn’t done so for a while.”11 Such claims only intensified the media’s curiosity. Interview after interview attempted to determine whether he was gay, a suggestion Morrissey consistently resisted. When pressed on the matter in 1985, he offered one of his most revealing responses:

“I don’t recognise such terms as heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and I think it’s important that there’s someone in pop music who’s like that. These words do great damage, they confuse people and they make people feel unhappy, so I want to do away with them.”12

In January 1989, he again rejected the premise that he could be fitted neatly into one of the available categories:

“I don’t fit into any sexual category at all, so I don’t feel people see it as being sexual, but as being intimate.”13

That distinction between the sexual and the intimate is easily overlooked, but it may be among the most revealing things Morrissey has ever said about himself.

The following year, in a lengthy interview with Nick Kent for The Face, the subject arose yet again. When Kent suggested that Morrissey wrote frequently about homosexual “longing,” Morrissey replied, “I’ve always said I leave things very open and that I sing about people. Without limitation. And I don’t think that automatically makes me a homosexual.” Asked why he objected to the word itself, Morrissey answered simply: “Because it’s... limiting and restrictive.”

More revealing still was the discussion that followed. Morrissey said that he had no relationships and explained that he had “always [been] attracted to men or women who were never attracted to me,” while those who were attracted to him inspired no reciprocal response. “I’ve never met the right person,” he concluded. When Kent finally asked whether Morrissey ever felt like taking “one mad plunge,” his response was curious: “I’d like to, yeah, but not just with anybody. It... uh... just doesn’t come naturally to me.”14

The importance of that exchange may lie less in Morrissey’s admission of attraction to both men and women than in the peculiar absence surrounding it. Once again, intimacy, attraction, and the possibility of relationships are present, but sex itself seems strangely remote. Even when directly invited to describe sexual action or impulse, Morrissey retreats toward qualification: perhaps, with the right person, under the right circumstances, but it simply does not “come naturally.”

In Autobiography, Morrissey disclosed a relationship with a Cockney boxer named Jake Walters. The two were together from 1994 to circa 1996. He also recounts his relationship with a woman named Tina Dehghani, whom he described as his “first experience of uncluttered commitment” and with whom he contemplated having a child.15 He likewise refers to a younger Italian man known only as “Gelato,” with whom he spent considerable time while living in Rome.16

These relationships complicate any simplistic portrait of Morrissey as someone incapable of attachment. They demonstrate, at a minimum, his capacity for affection, intimacy, companionship, and commitment with both men and women. But none of those things necessarily resolves the question of sexual attraction. Romantic attachment and sexual attraction, although commonly assumed to travel together, need not be identical.

Then, in 2013, Morrissey once again declined to adopt a conventional label:

“Unfortunately, I am not homosexual. In technical fact, I am humasexual. I am attracted to humans. But, of course... not many.”17

This typical Morrisseyan joke is easy to appreciate, but the qualification is worth lingering over: “not many.” After three decades of being asked whether he preferred men or women, Morrissey once again answered by resisting the premise of the question itself.

The Question Beneath the Question

For decades, journalists approached Morrissey’s sexuality as a puzzle to be solved, assuming that the answer must lie somewhere between heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. Yet that assumption may itself have been the mistake. The more revealing question is not simply whether Morrissey was attracted to men or women, but whether sexual attraction occupied the same place in his inner life that others simply assumed it did.

His interviews, his public persona, and perhaps most strikingly his songs reveal a man deeply preoccupied with intimacy, companionship, longing, rejection, beauty, isolation, and emotional connection, while unequivocal expressions of physical sexual desire are remarkably scarce. This distinction may help explain an apparent contradiction running throughout his work. The male nude on the sleeve of “Hand in Glove,” the same-sex intimacy of “This Charming Man,” the homosexual underworld of “Piccadilly Palare,” and numerous other examples demonstrate a sustained fascination with homoerotic subjects. Yet these coexist with women, heterosexual relationships, celibacy, and Morrissey’s repeated refusal to identify himself as homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual.

Perhaps they were never contradictions at all.

The Major Reveal: A Different Possibility

This essay proposes a different possibility: that asexuality provides a more coherent framework through which to understand Morrissey’s seemingly contradictory history of sexual self-description. Asexuality is generally understood not as an inability to love, form relationships, experience arousal, appreciate physical beauty, or even engage in sexual activity, but as experiencing little or no sexual attraction to other people. The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists recognizes asexuality as a sexual orientation and emphasizes that an asexual identity is not, in itself, a sexual or psychological disorder.18

Seen from this perspective, Morrissey’s professed celibacy assumes a different significance. Celebrity presumably provided him with opportunities for sexual relationships with either men or women that would have been unavailable to most people. Yet Morrissey repeatedly portrayed sex not as an overwhelming temptation heroically resisted, but as something curiously peripheral to his existence. His fascination with men, women, bodies, beauty, romance, desire, and rejection could therefore coexist with an absence, scarcity, or highly atypical experience of sexual attraction itself.

The homoeroticism of his art need no more prove homosexuality than his relationships with or attraction to women prove heterosexuality. A person may recognize beauty without wanting sexual possession of it; experience romantic or emotional attachment without experiencing corresponding sexual attraction; or find the cultural language of homosexuality compelling without personally inhabiting that sexual identity. What appears to fluctuate throughout Morrissey’s life and work is the object of his artistic, aesthetic, and emotional fascination, not necessarily the presence of sexual attraction itself.

Modern research provides a vocabulary that was largely unavailable when Morrissey first began attempting to explain himself. A widely cited national probability study of more than 18,000 British residents found that approximately one percent reported having experienced no sexual attraction toward either sex.19 Contemporary sexual-health authorities now explicitly distinguish asexuality from sexual dysfunction and recognize that little or no sexual attraction can represent a legitimate sexual orientation rather than a pathology requiring correction.

None of this can establish Morrissey’s orientation retrospectively, particularly when Morrissey himself has never publicly adopted the term asexual. Nor is it the purpose of this essay to diagnose him from afar or to replace one unwanted label with another. The evidence permits interpretation, not certainty. But asexuality does offer a framework in which many elements of Morrissey’s otherwise contradictory public record can coexist: homoerotic imagery without a homosexual identity; relationships with men and women without a settled bisexual identity; an intense fascination with beauty and intimacy alongside decades of professed celibacy; and a lifelong insistence that the conventional vocabulary of sexual orientation somehow failed to describe him.

The Question No One Asked

Morrissey’s career is filled with evidence of attraction, broadly understood, but surprisingly little unequivocal evidence of sexual attraction. He has written endlessly about longing, intimacy, loneliness, rejection, companionship, bodies, beauty, men, and women, yet spent decades resisting every conventional sexual category offered to him.

Perhaps the mistake was assuming that one of those categories had to fit.

For more than forty years, interviewers kept asking Morrissey essentially the same question: Which sex do you desire? The question no one asked was whether he experienced sexual desire for either sex in the conventional sense at all.

If asexuality does provide the missing piece, there is something almost cruelly ironic about Morrissey’s predicament. Few songwriters have written so obsessively about wanting and being wanted, about the agony of unreturned affection and the hope of finally finding another person, yet sexual attraction itself may have remained curiously beyond his reach. What others experienced instinctively, Morrissey may have encountered primarily as longing, fascination, intimacy, imagination, or abstraction. Nature, in other words, may have supplied him with an extraordinary capacity to contemplate desire while withholding some essential part of the experience everyone around him assumed he shared.

And perhaps that lends an unexpected resonance to a question Morrissey once put into song: “Will Nature make a man of me yet?” Read in this light, it becomes more than adolescent uncertainty about masculinity. It might almost stand as the unanswered question running beneath his entire public life. Not which man or woman would finally unlock the mystery, but whether the sexual impulse so effortlessly taken for granted by others would ever arrive at all.

From Riff to Ritual

During the Troy Tate sessions in London for the Smiths’ debut album, in the midst of 1983’s exceptionally hot summer, Johnny Marr began working on a tune that would eventually become “The Headmaster Ritual.” While still in its nebulous state, he periodically returned to it throughout the following year, refining and polishing it much like a lapidary patiently working a gemstone.

Marr later recalled, “I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote it, and I quite like that. I think it’s a handy device for cutting out the brain static that gets in the way of coming up with chord changes.”1

That sense of experimentation seems to have defined the song’s unusually long gestation. Marr later described how its disparate pieces gradually came together over the course of the following year:

“The nuts and bolts of The Headmaster Ritual came together during the first album, and I just carried on playing around with it. It started off as a very sublime sort of Joni Mitchell-esque chord figure; I played it to Morrissey but we never took it further. Then, as my life got more and more intense, so did the song. The bridge and the chorus part were originally for another song, but I put them together with the first part. That was unusual for me; normally I just hammer away at an idea until I've got a song. It's in open D turning, with a capo at the second fret. Again, it was heavily overdubbed."2

The song took on its final form some sixteen months after its initial conception, in October 1984, during the Meat Is Murder sessions, where the band rehearsed the arrangement and Morrissey added the lyrics.3

Marr noted that composing the song took him the longest ever for him to write any song:

“’The Headmaster Ritual’ was a favourite of mine for a long time just because I’m really pleased with the guitars on it and the strange tuning... For my part, ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ came together over the longest period of time I’ve ever spent on a song. I first played the riff to Morrissey when we were working on the demos for our first album with Troy Tate. I nailed the rest of it when we moved to Earls Court. That was around the time when we were being fabulous.”4

The song was mainly recorded in October 1984 at Amazon Studios in Liverpool, with the Smiths - mostly Marr - acting as producer and Stephen Street as recording engineer. Additional work was performed the following month at Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey, when overdubs were added to the track. The song's final mixing was completed in December 1984 at Island Record's Fallout Shelter in London.5

From Album Opener to Afterthought

“The Headmaster Ritual” was accorded a place of some distinction on Meat Is Murder, opening the Smiths’ second studio album when it was released on 11 February 1985. Its life as a single, however, was far more fragmented. In the United States, Sire Records tucked an edited version of the song away as a B-side on its 7-inch release of “How Soon Is Now?” in the spring of 1985.6

That summer, the song was granted a rare release of its own in the Netherlands, where it appeared as a single. Britain, curiously, had to wait. “The Headmaster Ritual” would not receive a UK single release until late 1988, more than a year after the Smiths had dissolved, when it finally appeared in the comparatively modern guise of a CD single.

Listen to the “The Headmaster Ritual” in the following link:

Cowboys, Canes and Viv Nicholson

The cover art for the Dutch single was originally intended to be a still of Sir Laurence Olivier with cane raised over Terence Stamp’s hand from the 1962 film Term of Trial.7 While Stamp gave his consent to use his image, Olivier was slow to respond in time for the release.

Consequently, Morrissey culled a black-and-white image of a child dressed as a cowboy from the 1965 film The Uncle8 for the single.

When the song was issued as a single in the UK in 1988, its sleeve featured a smiling Viv Nicholson (appearing for a third time on a Smiths release) sitting at an easel, painting.9

Live-Wire Spitfire

The song opens with an open-tuned chord that Marr has described as what Joni Mitchell10 “would have done had she been an MC5 fan or a punk rocker,” adding “I knew pretty much what every guitar track would be before we started.”11 The arrangement is more layered than it sounds. Alongside two Martin D-28 acoustic tracks, an Epiphone chorus part, and the trebly Epiphone Coronet heard at the end, Marr built the song’s signature riff from a doubled Rickenbacker figure. As he later explained:

“‘The Headmaster Ritual’ main riff is two tracks of Rickenbacker. I wasn’t specifically thinking of the Beatles’ ‘Day Tripper’ even though it sounds like it, but I did think of it as a George Harrison part.”12

For his part, Morrissey colorfully described Marr’s performance on the recording as “a live-wire spitfire guitar sound that takes on all-comers.”13

The result is nothing short of brilliance. Marr’s opening riff immediately announces the song’s intent, soon joined by Andy Rourke’s nimble, restless bass line and Mike Joyce’s adroit drumming, punctuated by oddly complementary cymbal splashes. Beneath and around them, the arrangement remains remarkably fluid, even as Morrissey steadily unleashes some of his most devastating lyrics.

Yet for all its force, “The Headmaster Ritual” also possesses an unexpected poignancy. There is an almost wistful momentum to the music that sits strangely against the harshness of the subject matter. Its chorus introduces a captivating wordless yodel that returns in the outro, where Morrissey sustains the vocalization for roughly one minute and twenty seconds as the song slowly fades away. The effect is dissonant and haunting, leaving an impression that lingers well after the music has ended. Morrissey himself sounds less defiant than wounded: earnest, anxious and at times almost pleading. His repeated desire simply to “go home” transforms what might otherwise have been a furious denunciation into something more vulnerable, the recollection of a frightened schoolboy trapped within an institution he has come to despise.

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How Barbarism Began

Although it was formally released in early 1985, the musical foundations of “Barbarism Begins at Home” stretch back to the summer of 1983. Its lyrics were written sometime between then and the song’s live debut in December of that year at London’s Electric Ballroom on 19 December 1983, where Morrissey introduced it with the wry remark, “Here’s one for the bootleg friends...” Over the course of 1984, as the Smiths took it on tour, the composition continued to evolve, both musically and lyrically, before finally assuming its definitive form.

According to Mike Joyce, the initial version of ‘Barbarism Begins At Home’ was about seventeen minutes long when the band first performed it:

“Mozzer had been knocking the red wine back and we got out there and it was about seventeen minutes long. Moz kept going into that middle bit - yodeling. Fuckin’ on and on. Johnny kept coming over and looking at me, and every time he did it I thought, ‘Thank God, he’s going to stop it.’ We were knackered.”2

In reality, the debut performance of the song was only 6:20 in duration and differed markedly from the recording that would appear slightly more than a year later on Meat Is Murder. Its structure was looser, and it contained several verses and lines that were ultimately discarded before the band entered the studio. Among the abandoned lyrics were, “I’ve always been such a decent lad” and “I am the man to keep you in place.” Despite its unfinished state, the new composition was greeted as enthusiastically as the band’s established material, prompting Morrissey, in mock disbelief, to ask, “Are you sure? Are you sure?”3

Listen to the Smiths’ debut performance of the song at the Electric Ballroom here:

The Smiths continued to perform “Barbarism Begins At Home” live throughout 1984, but the extra lyrics gradually disappeared, eventually becoming the familiar song heard on Meat Is Murder.

As an aside, from late 1984 to the end of the song’s live career (in June 1985), Morrissey would sometimes end the song with “...a crack on the head because of all the silly little things that you said, and you said the queen is dead...” Considering that “The Queen Is Dead” wasn’t written until late 1985 (about October or November 1985), it would seem that the genesis of the song occurred in this earlier time-frame when Morrissey began to include this extra lyric.

These Are the Good Times

Along with the other tracks that would appear on the Meat Is Murder studio album, "Barbarism Begins at Home" was recorded largely in October 1984 at Amazon Studios in Liverpool, with the Smiths - primarily Johnny Marr - overseeing production and Stephen Street serving as recording engineer. Additional overdubs were completed the following month at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey before the track received its final mix at Island Records’ Fallout Shelter studio in London in December 1984.4

The album version of the song can be heard in the following link:

In January 1985 a limited number of promotional 12-inch singles containing “Barbarism Begins At Home” were distributed to radio stations in the UK. Discogs.com shows two different versions, each numbered RTT171: one that featured the album version and another that contained both the album version and a 3:48 edited version. The runout groove on the A side of both versions of this promotional single was etched with “THESE ARE THE GOOD TIMES,”5 a seemingly upbeat message likely conceals something far darker: a mordant inversion of nostalgia, steeped in Morrissey’s characteristic gallows humor. The supposedly “good times” of childhood and domestic respectability are recast as something crueler and more sinister, exposing the home not as a sanctuary of innocence, but as the very place where “Barbarism Begins at Home.”

From Album Track to Single

The song was formally released 11 February 1985 as the penultimate track on Meat Is Murder, just before the album’s concluding titular track. Considering the normalization of mortal violence Morrissey explores in “Meat Is Murder,” “Barbarism Begins at Home” becomes the natural prelude to the gruesome detail contained in the the final track, where normalized cruelty reaches its most disturbing expression.

Two months after its initial release on Meat Is Murder, ‘Barbarism Begins at Home’ received a limited single release in Germany (both 7-inch and 12-inch editions) and Italy (only in 7-inch) in April 1985. In both countries, the 7-inch featured an edited 3:48 version of the title track, while the German 12-inch retained the full-length version. Listen to the edited version of the song in the following link:

“Barbarism Begins At Home” was not released as a single in the UK until 1988, when it was issued as a CD single featuring the edited version rather than the full album edition.

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